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NOAM CHOMSKY E3

interviews
DAVID BAR

ESSENTIAL CLASSICS IN POLITICS: NOAM CHOMSKY

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Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

Interviews with David Barsamian

Pluto Press

London

First published in the United Kingdom 1996 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

This edition is not for sale in North America

Transcripts by Sandy Adler

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1138 5 hbk

Digital processing by The Electric Book Company
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Classics in Politics: Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

Contents

Click on number to go to page

Introduction 6

Looking Ahead: Tenth Anniversary Interview 8

Rollback: The Return of Predatory Capitalism 23

History and Memory 81

The Federal Reserve Board 130

Take from the Needy and Give to the Greedy 152

Israel: Rewarding the Cop on the Beat 206

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

Introduction

In this third book in a series of interview collections, Noam Chomsky
begins with comments about the right-wing agenda that have turned out
to be prescient. Corporations with their political allies are waging an
unrelenting class war against working people. A vast social engineering
project is being implemented under the guise of fiscal responsibility. In
this latest incarnation of class warfare, there is no doubt as to which
side Chomsky is on. For him, solidarity is not an abstract concept but a
vital and unifying principle.

The interviews were recorded in Chomsky’s office at MIT and by
phone from 1994 to 1996. Some were broadcast nationally and
internationally as part of my Alternative Radio weekly series. Others
were aired on KGNU in Boulder, Colorado.

The accolades and accusations accorded Noam Chomsky are too
numerous — and too well known — to warrant discussion here. For those
sympathetic to his views there are a number of possible responses. One
is to stand in awe of his prolific output and unwavering principles,
limited by the sense that his abilities are unmatchable. A second choice
is to implement his simple formula for learning about the world and
creating social change: “There has not in history ever been any answer
other than, Get to work on it." Indeed, it’s not like mastering quantum
physics or learning Sanskrit.

Class Warfare is provided in the hopes the reader might choose to
engage in political action. After countless books, interviews, articles and
speeches, Chomsky concludes with one wish: “What I should be doing

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

is way more of this kind of thing." That a person of his commitment is
seeking ways to increase his contribution is, for me, a source of
continued inspiration.

— David Barsamian
March 10, 1996

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

Tenth Anniversary Interview

December 20, 1994

DB Noam, it was ten years ago that we did our first interview. I
know that you do so few interviews it probably is very vivid in your
mind.

Absolutely. I recall every word [laughs],

DB / remember it well because I had all sorts of technical problems.
I couldn’t operate the tape recorder. I called you and said, We can’t do
it. Then I managed to figure it out. Anyway, that was ten years ago. A
review of Keeping the Rabble in Line says we have a “symbiotic
relationship. ” Is that something that we need to worry about?

As long as it’s symbiotic at long distance, I guess it’s OK.

DB All right, good. Actually, we usually end on this kind of note. I
want to start with your upcoming plans. I know you have a trip to
Australia coming up in January.

That one’s been in the works for about twenty years, I guess.

DB Any new books?

Looking Ahead

Right now I’m in the middle of a very technical book on linguistics
and I have in the back of my mind a long-promised book on the
philosophy of language. On the political issues, I’m not exactly sure. I
might be putting together some essays and updating them. Several
people have asked for updated and extended essays on current matters
and I might do that. I’m not really sure. I have sort of a feeling that I’ve
saturated the market a bit with books. I might wait a while.

DB How about writing for Z? Are you going to continue that?

Oh, sure. I have a couple of articles coming out right now. There’s a
long one, which was too long, so it was broken into two parts. It will be
coming out in January and February. There’s a bunch of other things.
And other journals.

DB The last time we had a conversation you said that the linguistics
work was particularly exciting. There was a certain animation in your
voice. What particularly is attractive to you about the work you’re doing
now in linguistics?

It’s hard to explain easily. There’s a kind of a rhythm to any work, I
think, probably to any scientific work. Some interesting ideas come
along and change the way you look at things. A lot of people start trying
them and applying them. They find all kinds of difficulties and try to
work it out. There’s a period of working on things within a relatively fixed
framework. At some point they converge, or something leaps out at you
and you suddenly see there’s another way of looking at it that is much
better than the old one and that will put to rest a lot of the problems
that people have been grappling with. Now you go off to a new stage.

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

Right now there’s a good chance that it’s that kind of moment, which for
me at least has happened maybe two or three times before altogether. It
happens to be particularly exciting this time. There seems to be a way
possibly to show that a core part of human language, the core part of
the mechanisms that relate sound and meaning, are not only largely
universal, but in fact even from a certain point of view virtually optimal.
Meaning on very general considerations if you were to design a system,
like if you were God designing a system, you would come close to doing
it this way. There are a lot of remarkable things about language anyway.
It has properties that, it has been known for a long time, you just
wouldn’t expect a biological organism to have at all, properties which in
many ways are more similar to things you find in the inorganic world, for
unknown reasons. If this turns out to be on the right track, it would be
even more remarkable in that same sense because the last thing you
would expect of a biological system is that it would be anything like
optimally designed.

DB Is this input coming from students and colleagues?

A lot of it’s work of mine, but of course it’s all highly interactive.
These are all very cooperative enterprises. I have a course every fall
which is a sort of lecture-seminar. People show up for it from all over
the place. It’s developed a certain pattern over the past thirty or forty
years. A lot of faculty show up from other universities, other disciplines.
There are many people who have been sitting in for twenty and thirty
years, people from other universities. A lot of people come from the
whole northeast region, from Canada and Maryland. There are plenty of
European visitors. It’s a very lively, ongoing sort of lecture-seminar. I
lecture and then there’s a lot of discussion. It’s dealing with questions at
the borders of research, always. Sometimes it’s really interesting.

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

Sometimes it’s not so interesting. This last fall, in fact the last two years,
particularly this fall, a lot of things fell together as I was lecturing. I’m
writing them up right now.

DB That’s great. I'm excited for you, too, that you find your work
engaging.

I always find it engaging, but as I say, there’s a rhythm. Sometimes
it’s more a matter of patchwork within a framework, and sometimes it’s
a matter of suddenly seeing another way of looking at things which
seems to cut through a lot of problems and to have exciting prospects.
This is maybe the most interesting thing I've thought of, at least.
Whether it’s right or not is another question.

DB And given that, and this vital work that you’re involved with, I
was wondering if any thoughts of retiring come up.

Sure. I have to at my age. And there are also questions about what’s
the best way of developing continuity in the department, and the impact
on the field, and there’s personal life, and so on. There are so many
things I want to do. There’s also the question of distribution of time and
energy.

DB How’s your health?

Fine.

DB That’s not a major consideration?

No.

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

DB Over the last few weeks I was rereading your book Turning the
Tide, in particular the section on the right-wing counterattack and
specifically the growth and power of right-wing institutions and
foundations.

That’s interesting. I was just reading the same thing.

DB You were ?

In fact, the article that I have in Z begins by referring back to some of
the things that were going on in 1980 and 1984, those elections. It
starts with some of my comments adapted from that very section. The
analogy is so striking.

DB That’s what I thought, too. I wonder if the recent . . .

It’s just like a repeat.

DB The November 1994 election.

But what happened, and the fraud about what happened are
identical.

DB The fraud being . . .

One of the points I made back then — this is in the mid-1980s — is
that both the 1980 and the 1984 elections were called “conservative
landslides," “great Reagan revolutions,” etc. But in fact, what happened
was quite different. The population was continuing to move away from

Classics in Politics.- Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

Reaganite-type politics. Virtually no one in the general population saw
what they call “conservatism” as an issue. It was 4% or 8% or
something. Reagan, of course, had under a third of the electorate. But
furthermore, of the voters, most of them wanted his legislative program
not to be enacted because they opposed it. What was actually
happening there was a vote against. People felt remote from the system,
didn’t like what was going on, opposed everything that was happening.
Their own concerns and interests, which were sort of New Deal-style
liberalism, roughly, were simply not being articulated at all in the
political system, so they either didn’t vote, or they voted against. But
also, though maybe they liked Reagan’s smile more than Mondale’s
frown, they also, of people who had an opinion, about 70% of the voters
were opposed to Reagan’s policies. Of the non-voters it was much
higher.

That’s pretty much what happened this time. The reason it was
called a “conservative landslide” then was because elite groups wanted
it that way. They wanted to tear apart the rather weak remnants of
welfare state policies and redirect social policy even more than usual
towards the interests of the powerful and the privileged. So that’s what
they wanted. That’s the way they interpreted the vote. That’s across the
spectrum. That includes liberals for the most part. Pretty much the same
is true now. So if you look at the latest vote, the 1992 vote and the
1994 vote were virtually identical, with a couple of percentage points
difference, largely attributable to the fact that the voting was skewed
even more toward the wealthy than is usual.

Among non-voters, who are, of course, the big majority, the
overwhelming number call themselves “pro-democrat," but what they
mean by “democrat” is something that wasn’t represented in the current
election. The opposition to “New Democrats” of the Clinton variety was
much higher than to what are called “traditional” Democrats, traditional

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

liberals. If you look at the outcome, the Democrats who tried to mobilize
the traditional constituencies, like labor and women, they did rather
well. The ones who got smashed were the Clinton-style “New
Democrats." If you look at opinion polls, you can see why. Public
opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to the policies that are shared by
Gingrich and Clinton, on just about every issue. But most people simply
don’t feel themselves represented. When asked, for example, whether
they thought that having a conservative Congress was an important
issue, in this election, about 12% of voters said, Yes. Virtually no one, in
other words. It’s very similar to the early 1980s. The reason why it’s
described this way, I’m sure, is that these are the policies that the
privileged and the powerful want. So they’re going to claim that they
have a popular mandate for them, even though they don’t. It’ll mean a
further narrowing of the spectrum towards the right by choice. Not under
popular pressure, but by choice of elites. That’s what they want. And it’s
not surprising that they want it. It’s good for them.

Clinton and his advisors decided to interpret the vote as meaning that
they should move even further to an unpopular position than they
already were, instead of interpreting it to mean, We ought to speak to
the majority of the population who are opposed to what we’re doing,
and even more opposed to what the Republicans are doing. So they
interpret it that way, despite their own polls, which showed the
opposite, because that’s the conclusion they want to draw.

DB But tell me one thing: As / recall, in the 1980s, during the
Reagan period, the elite corporate media pretty much welcomed
Reaganomics and the whole Reagan program, whereas this time one
reads in the New York Times and the Washington Post scathing
critiques of Gingrich, really strong criticisms.

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

That was before the election. It’s toned down since then. The
Gingrich program has several aspects to it. He wants to focus on what
he calls “cultural issues.” That makes sense, because when you’re going
to rob people blind you don’t want to have them focus their attention on
economic issues. The second is the actual programs, robbing people
blind and enriching the rich. On those programs, I don’t see that there is
much opposition from the corporate media. For example, you read
today’s editorials. Did they condemn Clinton for yesterday announcing
that he was going to make government leaner and cut back support for
nuclear waste disposal and so on? I doubt it. I haven’t read the papers
yet.

What they do oppose, however, and are very upset about, is what
they call the Gingrich-style “cultural offensive," because that in fact is
attacking the values of the elite as well. I think there’s a kind of internal
contradiction there that elite groups are having a hard time coming to
terms with. In order to push through the social policies that really
interest them, like distributing resources even more to the rich than
before and reducing the status of the general population and
marginalizing them even more than before — in order to carry that off,
they have to develop at least some kind of popular support. You have to
mobilize some support for what you’re doing. You can’t do that on the
social and economic issues. So therefore you turn to what they call
“cultural issues." There’s something that resembles the 1930s about
this, Germany in the 1930s. You try to mobilize people on something
else. So a large part of the focus of attention in the Gingrich program is
what he calls “rebuilding American civilization,” which means cutting
back on rights of women, prayer in the schools, narrowing the spectrum
of discussion, attacking civil liberties, and so on. Those are things that
rich and powerful people don’t like, because they benefit from those.
First of all, they tend to be what is called “liberal” on cultural values.

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

They want the kind of freedom that would be undermined if the Gingrich
types actually were serious about this talk. So you get a kind of
contradiction. You see it very clearly.

For example, the New York Times a couple of weeks ago had an
editorial defending the counterculture.

DB That was astounding.

I didn’t think it was astounding at all.

DB You didn’t?

It was fairly natural. Because what they think of as the “counter-
culture” is what they themselves approve of. And if you did a poll among
corporate executives, they would agree. They don’t want to have their
kids forced to pray in school. They don’t want to have religious
fundamentalists telling them what to do. They want their wives and
daughters to have opportunities, abortion rights and other forms of
freedom. They don’t want to restore the kind of values, for themselves in
their personal lives, that Gingrich is talking about. That’s the kind of
counterculture that they’re defending. So I didn’t think that it was
surprising.

On the other hand, there was an even more dramatic article, I
thought, a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days
ago which actually talked about “class war" and “economic classes."
These are terms that are unusable in the U.S., but now they’re using
them. It’s extremely interesting to see how they’re putting it. They said
that there is a class war developing between ordinary working-class
blokes, that’s one side, and they’re an economic class — they said that — -
and then the elites who are oppressing them, who happen to be the

Classics in Politics.- Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

liberals. The elites who are oppressing them are the elitist liberals with
their crazy countercultural values. Who stands up for the ordinary
working-class blokes? The so-called conservatives, who are in fact doing
everything they can to destroy them. That’s the class war. They
apparently feel confident enough about their own takeover of the
doctrinal system, which is also discussed in this 1985 book [Turning
the Tide] that you mentioned. They feel confident enough about that
that they’re willing to even allow words like “class war” and “class
conflict” as long as the ruling class is identified as the people who
espouse these liberal, countercultural values. It’s not a total perversion
of reality. If you go to the actual, real ruling class, the people who own
and invest and speculate and CEOs and the rest of them, they do
generally share these so-called “liberal" values. That’s why you find
these rather striking internal contradictions, I think. On the one hand,
Gingrich is following a propaganda line which is almost required if you
want to be able to carry off a major attack against the population. But
the elements of that propaganda line, at least taken literally, also strike
at the interests of the rich and powerful. There is an internal
contradiction there, and I think that’s why you’re seeing things like that
Times editorial.

DB That was on Sunday, December 11, 1994. I just want to
mention one thing from that. They called the Vietnam policy
“deranged. ”

But you see, that’s an old story.

DB / don’t recall them using that adjective during the period.

That goes back to the early 1960s, when they were saying, These

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

guys are crazy. They don’t know how to win the war.

DB So you think it’s the pragmatists.

Are they saying the aggression in South Vietnam was immoral?
They’re saying it was deranged. Look at this crazy thing — we were
devoting our lives and energies and effort to save people who couldn’t be
saved because they were so valueless. That’s back to David Halberstam
in the early 1960s. The so-called critics were the people who said, You
guys aren’t doing it right. Anthony Lewis, when he finally became
articulate against the war around 1970, said it began with blundering
efforts to do good but ended up as a disaster. So it was deranged.

DB More on this class war issue. If the Republican right-wing
economic initiative, which is essentially an attack on the poor . . .

“Poor” is a funny word for it. It’s an attack on maybe three-quarters
of the population.

DB Might not elites be concerned in that it would result in social
instability and uprisings like Los Angeles?

That’s why they have this huge crime bill, and they want to extend
the crime bill. They want to criminalize a large part of the population.
They have been working on this for some time. I think what’s actually
going on, in my opinion, if you go back to the 1970s, it began to
appear, because of changes in the international economy, as if it might
be possible for real ruling groups to do something that they’ve always
hoped to do but couldn’t, namely to roll back everything connected with
the social contract that had been won by working people and poor

Classics in Politics.- Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

people over a century of struggle. There was a kind of social contract. I
think they think they can roll it back. They can go right back to the days
of satanic mills (to use William Blake’s phrase) where they believe they
have enough weapons against the population — and it’s not

implausible — that they can destroy human rights, eliminate the curse of
democracy, except in a purely formal way, move power into the hands of
absolutist, unaccountable institutions which will run the world in their
own interests, without looking at anyone else, enhance private power,
and eliminate workers’ rights, political rights, the right to food, destroy it
all. Eliminate what used to be called the right to live. There was a battle
about this in the early nineteenth century, and they couldn’t quite carry
it off. Now I think they think they can carry it off. That means in effect
turning the industrialized countries into a kind of Third World, a kind of
Latin America. That means for a sector of the population great wealth
and privilege and enormous government protection, because none of
these people believe in a free market or anything remotely like it. They
want a powerful welfare state, directing resources and protection to
them. So on the one hand you have a powerful welfare state for a small
sector of the population. For the rest, those who you need to do the dirty
work, you pay them a pittance, and if they won’t do it, get somebody
else. A large part of them are just superfluous. You don’t need them at
all. In the Third World, maybe you send out death squads. Here you
don’t quite send out death squads, so you lock them into urban slums
which are more or less urban concentration camps and make sure they
don’t have any resources there so it will collapse and deteriorate. If that
won't work, just throw them into jail.

DB Do you see any resistance to these policies developing?

Organized resistance? In a sense, but it’s not constructive. For

Classics in Politics.- Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

example, the vote in 1994 was a sort of resistance. It was an over-
whelming vote against everything that’s going on. But it didn’t take a
constructive form.

DB 61% of the population didn’t vote.

Yeah, but that’s normal. Most people think it’s all a joke. But even of
those who voted, take a look at the minority who voted. I forget the
exact numbers, but I think it was about a 6 to 1 vote against. Which is
very similar to 1980, except that it’s much more extreme now because
we’ve had fifteen years of Reaganism. It started late in the Carter era,
went through the Reagan years, and it’s continuing through Clinton.
That means a continuing increase in inequality, continuing literally the
absolute reduction in standard of living for a majority of the population.
It was stagnation for a while. It’s been reduction since the 1980s. It’s
going down more during the Clinton years. What’s remarkable now is
that this is the first time ever, maybe, that during a period of economic
recovery general living standards and economic standards have been
declining. The Census Bureau just came out with figures for 1993, after
two years of so-called recovery. The median income, where half is
above, half below, has declined 7% since 1989. It’s very unusual,
maybe unprecedented for a recovery. Just this morning, did you get the
New York Times this morning?

DB Yeah, I’ve got it.

Have a look. They report the Clinton budget cuts, etc. On the inside
page, Section B, the continuation of the story, there’s almost a full page
devoted to the continuation of that. Then, on the right-hand column,
there’s an article reporting the latest conference of mayors. If you

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

haven’t read it, read it. It’s interesting. The conference of mayors' report
points out the number of people desperately needing food and housing
has sharply increased. I think the numbers are in the range of 15% or
something like that. A big proportion of them are simply being denied it
because the cities don’t have the resources. For that to be happening
during a recovery — for that to be happening in a rich country is
scandalous anyway. But for it to be happening in a period of recovery,
an increase in starvation and homelessness, a sharp increase, enough
that the conference of mayors made a report and did a bitter protest
against federal policies, that’s pretty astonishing.

People are aware that things are bad, but they don’t have a
constructive way to respond. For example, there’s nothing in the political
system. The polls and opinion studies and so on, including the exit polls
after the last election, made it pretty clear what would be a winning
policy in the political arena, namely, something that has a kind of
populist, reformist, social democratic-type character. That would
probably get a large majority of the population, judging by public
attitudes. But nobody is going to say that, because they all want
something else.

It was kind of interesting during the campaign to see how both sides
covered up some very striking issues. Take, say, Newt Gingrich, who is
just smashing the Democrats with all of his talk about a “nanny state"
and a welfare state and get the government off our backs and you guys
have been ruining the world with your nanny state. Fie was killing the
Democrats with this. I couldn’t find one person, either in the so-called
liberal press or among the Democrats themselves, who made the
obvious rejoinder: You’re the biggest advocate in the country of the
nanny state, or certainly one of the biggest ones. As I think you know,
Gingrich’s constituency, his district, gets more federal subsidies than any
suburban county in the country outside the federal system.

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

Looking Ahead

DB That's Cobb County, right outside of Atlanta.

Take away Arlington, Virginia, which is part of Washington, and the
Florida home of the Kennedy Space Center, and Cobb County is first.
That’s the nanny state. They are the beneficiaries of social policies
which direct public resources toward the rich. A lot of it is through the
Pentagon, which has that domestic function.

DB Lockheed is based in Cobb County.

Lockheed is their main employer. Besides that it’s mainly things like
computers and electronics, which is very heavily public-subsidized, and
insurance. Why is insurance a place where you can make a lot of
money? It’s because the social policy is to ensure that private power,
meaning insurance companies, runs huge programs. The most striking is
the health program. That’s public policy. Sane countries don’t have that.
So his constituency is in fact the beneficiaries of the nanny state to an
extent beyond probably any other in the country outside the federal
system.

To get back to my point, no Democrat pointed this out that I could
see. And the reason is, I suspect, that they agree. They don’t want to
expose that, even at the cost of seriously losing elections and control of
Congress.

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

Rollback

The Return of Predatory Capitalism

January 31 and February 3, 1995

DB You just came back from a trip to Australia. Was it your first
visit to the country?

It was indeed my first visit to Australia. I was there for eight or nine
days, a pretty constant schedule of talks and interviews, the usual stuff.
There was the usual range of topics with enormous and very interested
audiences. There was a lot of radio and television. The main invitation
was from the East Timor Relief Association. There is a substantial
Timorese community there. I gave talks primarily on East Timor. That
was one major focus. And of course on Australia’s policies towards East
Timor and other things, also domestic economic policies.

The timing turned out to be very propitious. A major case opened at
the World Court yesterday. I haven’t seen it reported here, but it’s being
reported widely in the world press and of course extensively in Australia.
The case involves Portugal and Australia. It has to do with the robbery of
the oil of East Timor in a treaty signed between Australia and Indonesia.
One primary reason (we know from leaked diplomatic cables and so on)
for the Western support for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which
was sort of near genocidal, was the fact that they thought they could
make a better deal on robbing the oil resources with Indonesia than they
could either with Portugal, which was the administering power, or an

Rollback

independent East Timor. That was stated very explicitly in diplomatic
cables during the period when the governments were pretending that
they didn’t know that the invasion was imminent. But of course they did
know. So that’s a big issue now. Both the World Court hearing and the
very fact that this is taking place, which is kind of as if Libya had made
a deal with Iraq to exploit Kuwait’s oil when they hadn’t been driven out.
It’s roughly like that. So that was one big issue. And since it is just
coming up to the World Court, that was timely.

The other thing was that, in fact as I landed at the airport, the first
headline that greeted me in the national newspaper, The Australian,
was that Australia agreed to sell advanced assault rifles to Indonesia,
which of course are not to be used to defend Indonesia from China.
They’re being used for internal repression and the military occupation of
East Timor, where the fighting is still going on and the repression is very
severe. The point is that Australia found a niche market, because the
U.S. had backed away from that, finally, under lots of pressure here,
Congressional and popular pressure. The U.S. finally got to the point of
withholding some arms, at least small arms, from the killers. Australia
instantly moved in. The cynicism of that is a little hard to miss. You
have to remember people in Australia know, even if they don’t read
about it in schoolbooks, but they remember, that about 60,000
Timorese were killed during the Second World War. The island of Timor
was divided, half was a Portuguese colony and half was Dutch. The
Portuguese part would have probably remained neutral through the war,
like Macao, which was another Portuguese colony. Japan never violated
its neutrality. Portugal was a fascist country. It was a semi-ally. So
chances are Timor would have remained neutral. Anyhow, Australia
invaded, and about ten days after Pearl Harbor the Japanese counter-
invaded. There were a couple hundred Australian commandos there.
They were able to survive, the ones that did, mostly because of

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assistance from Timorese. Otherwise they would have been wiped out
instantly. Then they finally were withdrawn, but of course the Timorese
were left. The ones that the Japanese thought had supported them were
totally slaughtered. That fighting on Timor — if you look at the geography
you'll see how it works. The Japanese might well have gone on to invade
Australia. In fact they were going to. They never did. They bombed, but
they never invaded. And probably the fighting on Timor stopped them.
So 60,000 Timorese dead certainly saved a lot of lives of Australian
commandos, and may have saved Australia from being invaded.

To repay that debt by being the only country in the world to officially
recognize the occupation, to steal their oil, to arm the murderers,
doesn’t go over very well in the population. And there’s also been
tremendous cynicism in the government in justifying this. There’s a kind
of backlog of resentment and concern, plus the fact that it’s right next
door, so they get Timorese refugees. So it’s a big issue.

DB You also gave a presentation on anarchy. Is there a lively
anarchist movement in Australia?

I’m not in much of a position to say. The meeting was at the town
hall in Sydney. There were a couple of thousand people there, and it
was overflowing. They had had an all-day conference with plenty of
people, so something’s lively. You know what these trips are like, you
run from one talk to another. I can’t really comment on what the
movements are like.

DB / had a glimpse of what you go through. In November I was in
Seattle and Olympia. I gave three public talks, three interviews, and a
workshop in a day and a half. At the end of that time, my brains were
completely fried. I had no idea what I’d said to whom. I was wondering,

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how do you keep not just your equilibrium and equanimity, but that
separation of what you said?

As far as I know, I have only one talent. I'm not trying to be modest. I
think I know what I'm good at and what I’m not good at. The one talent
that I have which I know many other friends don’t seem to have is I’ve
got some quirk in my brain which makes it work like separate buffers in
a computer. If you play around with a computer you know you can put
things in different places and they just stay there and you can go back to
them whenever you feel like it and they’re there. I can somehow do that.

I can write a very technical paper in snatches: a piece on an airplane,
another piece three weeks later, six months later finally get back to it
and pick up where I left off. Somehow I don’t have any problem
switching very quickly from one thing to another. I have some other
friends like this. I had one, a well-known logician in Israel, who was a
very close friend. We would see each other every five or six years. We
would always just pick up the conversation where we had left it off,
without any break, without even noticing it, particularly. We didn’t even
notice it until people seemed to find it strange.

DB Did your thoughts while you were in Australia ever turn to Alex
Carey, the man you dedicated Manufacturing Consent to?

Very much so. In fact, I was there for a book launch. His book of
posthumous essays, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, was published
by the University of New South Wales, where he taught. I wrote an
introduction to it, in fact. One of the things I did was to go to the launch
of the book and talk about it a bit and meet the family. I also met some
old friends who I knew through and with Alex when he visited here years
back, so there was a lot of personal stuff, too.

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DB What's memorable about his work ? What was his contribution?

Alex Carey did the pioneering work in an extremely important field
which in fact has yet to be investigated. That’s the field of corporate
propaganda, which is a major phenomenon in the modern world and
almost unstudied. His most important essay “Changing Public Opinion:
The Corporate Offensive,” which has been circulating underground for
years (I’ve duplicated and circulated endless copies myself) was never
published in his lifetime. It’s in the new collection. It opens by pointing
out — he says it better than this — that there have been three major
phenomena in the twentieth century with regard to democracy. One is
the extension of the franchise, which was broad. The second was the
growth of corporations. The third was the growth of corporate
propaganda to undermine democracy. And he’s exactly right. That’s why
we have a public relations industry. It was established approximately at
the time that corporations reached their current form early in the
century. It was created in order, as they put it, to “control the public
mind,” because they recognized that the public mind would be the
greatest hazard facing industrialists, and they understood that
democracy is a real threat to private tyranny, just as it’s a threat to state
tyranny. Now, we are in a system of private tyranny, which was being
established early in the century, and very consciously so. In fact it was
consciously established as an attack on individual liberty. That’s a part
of corporate law which is only known in scholarly circles.

Part of this was to ensure that democracy couldn’t function. And
since you have some degree of state violence, but limited degrees,
especially with the increase in the franchise and participation, it was
understood right off that you have to control opinion. That led to the
huge public relations industry and massive propaganda campaigns,

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efforts to sell Americanism and harmony and to sell American
capitalism. People are deluged with propaganda on this through the
Advertising Council and radio and television and other media. It’s very
conscious. Carey is the first person to have seriously studied it, and
almost the last person. Now there’s a little literature on it coming along,
primarily an excellent study called Selling Free Enterprise, by Elizabeth
Fones-Wolf published by the University of Illinois Press, focusing on the
post-World War II period. Fones-Wolf adds a great deal of new material
on the extraordinary scale of the propaganda efforts “to indoctrinate
people with the capitalist story,” and the dedicated self-consciousness
with which “the everlasting battle for the minds of men" was pursued.
It’s a topic of such incredible significance in the twentieth century that it
ought to be a major focus. We are immersed in it all the time. It explains
a lot. The U.S. is different from other countries in this respect. It has a
much more class-conscious business community, for all kinds of
historical reasons. It didn’t develop out of feudalism and aristocracy. So
there weren’t the conflicting factors you had in other places — the highly
class-conscious business community, very Marxist in character, vulgar
Marxist, fighting a bitter class war, and very aware of it. You read
internal publications and it’s like reading Maoist pamphlets half the
time. They don’t spend billions of dollars a year on propaganda for the
fun of it. They do it with a purpose. For a long time the purpose was to
resist and contain human rights and democracy and the whole welfare
state framework, the social contract, that developed over the years. They
wanted to contain it and limit it. Now they feel, in the current period,
that they can really roll it back. They’d go right back to satanic mills,
murdering poor people, basically the social structure of the early
nineteenth century. That’s the situation we’re in right now. These huge
propaganda offensives are a major part of it.

The real importance of Carey’s work is that it’s the first effort and

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until now the major effort to bring some of this to public attention. It’s
had a tremendous influence on the work I’ve done. Ed Herman and I
dedicated our book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. He had just died. It
was not intended as just a symbolic gesture. He got both of us started in
a lot of this work.

DB You just mentioned “rollback. ” It’s also the title of a series of
essays in Z magazine that you just wrote. That was originally a Cold
War term.

I picked it up from there. The standard line, if you read the Clinton
Doctrine as announced by Anthony Lake, the intellectual in the
administration, is that for years we’ve been involved in containment of a
threat to market democracy. Now we’re going to enlarge it. So he’s
picking Cold War imagery. And I think that Cold War imagery is
appropriate, except that he’s got it backwards. For years we’ve been
involved in containment of democracy, freedom, human rights, and even
markets, and now we’re going to be able to roll them back. “Rollback" is
another Cold War term, as you mentioned. The traditional Cold War
policies were that we oscillate between containment and rollback.
Containment is Kennan’s policy. You prevent the Soviet power from
expanding. That’s containment.

Rollback has been, in fact, official U.S. policy since 1950. NSC-68,
the core Cold War doctrine, is an advocacy of rollback. That’s when
Kennan was thrown out and Nitze and others came in. Rollback meant
we undermine and destroy Soviet power and we reach negotiations with
“a successor state or states," as the NSC put it. These traditional
international Cold War notions are, I think, very appropriate, except that
they’re misplaced. Containment is in fact correct, but it wasn’t
containment of a Soviet threat. It was containment of the threat of

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freedom, democracy, human rights, other threats to authority. And now
they feel they can move on to roll back and unravel the entire social
contract which developed through large-scale popular struggle over a
century and a half, which did sort of soften the edges of predatory
private tyranny, and often softened them a lot. In Germany, for example,
workers have fairly reasonable conditions. So that has to be rolled back,
and we have to go back to the days when we had wage slavery, as it
was called by working people in the nineteenth century. No rights. The
only rights you get are the rights you gain on the labor market. If your
children can’t make enough money to survive, they starve. Your choices
are the workhouse prison, the labor market, whatever you can get there.
Or, if you go back to the early days of the 1820s, the line was, “Or go
somewhere else.” Meaning, go to the places where white settlers are
massacring the indigenous populations and opening them up, like the
U.S. and Australia, for example.

Of course, now that option is gone. You don’t go somewhere else. So
the choices are limited to the other two, as the founders of modern
economics, like Ricardo and Malthus and others, pointed out:
workhouse prison or starvation, or whatever you can gain on the labor
market. You don’t have any rights on the labor market. It’s just a
market. That in fact is the foundation of the intellectual tradition that is
called classical economics now, neoliberalism, and so on.

The idea is to go right back to those choices, with one crucial
difference. There’s a little secret that everybody knows but you’re not
supposed to say, and that is that nobody who advocated this believed a
word of it. They always wanted a very powerful state which intervenes
massively, but it’s a welfare state for the rich. That’s the way the U.S.
was founded. In fact, the U.S. pioneered that development. It’s been the
most protectionist of all the industrial societies. It’s a well-known fact.
Alexander Hamilton is the one who invented the concept of infant

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industry protection and modern protectionism. The U.S. has always
been a pioneer and a bastion of protectionism, which is why it’s a rich,
powerful country. Another slight secret of economic history, again well
known to scholars, is that the free market policies have been an utter
disaster. Anyone who is subjected to them gets smashed, which is why
the Third World looks the way it is. They were forced on the Third
World. And every single developed society has radically violated those
principles, the U.S. more than most. That’s closely correlated with
growth. If you look historically, protectionism is actually correlated with
trade, even. The more protectionism, the more trade, for a simple
reason: protectionism enhances growth, and growth enhances trade.
That was generally true over quite a long period. And protectionism is
only one form of state intervention.

For poor people and working people, they have to be subjected to
market discipline. That part is true. But the other side, which is less
said, is that rich people are going to have a nanny state protecting and
subsidizing them, and a powerful one.

DB One of the heroes of the current right-wing revival — I’m not
going to use the term “ conservative ” — is Mam Smith. You’ve done
some pretty impressive research on Smith that has excavated, as the
postmodernists would say, a lot of information that’s not coming out.
You’ve often quoted him describing the "vile maxim of the masters of
mankind: all for ourselves and nothing for other people. ”

I didn't do any research at all on Smith. I just read him. There’s no
research. Just read it. He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment.
What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of
Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the
first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how

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wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point
hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy
human beings and turn them into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it
is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized
society the government is going to have to take some measures to
prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.

He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that
under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality.
That’s the argument for them, because he thought equality of condition
(not just opportunity) is what you should be aiming at. It goes on and
on. He gave a devastating critique of what we would call North-South
policies. He was talking about England and India. He bitterly
condemned the British experiments they were carrying out which were
devastating India.

He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way
states work. He pointed out that it’s totally senseless to talk about a
nation and what we would nowadays call “national interests.” He simply
observed in passing, because it’s so obvious, that in England, which is
what he’s discussing — and it was the most democratic society of the
day — the principal architects of policy are the “merchants and
manufacturers," and they make certain that their own interests are, in
his words, “most peculiarly attended to," no matter what the effect on
others, including the people of England, who, he argued, suffered from
their policies. He didn’t have the data to prove it at the time, but he was
probably right.

This truism was a century later called class analysis, but you don't
have to go to Marx to find it. It’s very explicit in Adam Smith. It’s so
obvious that any ten-year-old can see it. So he didn’t make a big point of
it. He just mentioned it. But that’s correct. If you read through his work,
he’s intelligent. He’s a person who was from the Enlightenment. His

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driving motives were the assumption that people are guided by
sympathy and feelings of solidarity and the need for control of their own
work, much like other Enlightenment and early Romantic thinkers. He’s
part of that period, the Scottish Enlightenment.

The version of him that’s given today is just ridiculous. But I didn’t
have to do any research to find this out. All you have to do is read. If
you're literate, you’ll find it out. I did do a little research in the way it’s
treated, and that’s interesting. For example, the University of Chicago,
the great bastion of free market economics, etc., etc., published a
bicentennial edition of the hero, a scholarly edition with all the footnotes
and the introduction by a Nobel Prize winner, George Stigler, a huge
index, a real scholarly edition. That’s the one I used. It’s the best
edition. The scholarly framework was very interesting, including Stigler’s
introduction. It’s likely he never opened The Wealth of Nations. Just
about everything he said about the book was completely false. I went
through a bunch of examples in writing about it, in Year 501 and
elsewhere.

But even more interesting in some ways was the index. Adam Smith
is very well known for his advocacy of division of labor. Take a look at
“division of labor” in the index and there are lots and lots of things
listed. But there’s one missing, namely his denunciation of division of
labor, the one I just cited. That’s somehow missing from the index. It
goes on like this. I wouldn’t call this research, because it’s ten minutes’
work, but if you look at the scholarship, then it’s interesting.

I want to be clear about this. There is good Smith scholarship. If you
look at the serious Smith scholarship, nothing I’m saying is any surprise
to anyone. How could it be? You open the book and you read it and it’s
staring you right in the face. On the other hand, if you look at the myth
of Adam Smith, which is the only one we get, the discrepancy between
that and the reality is enormous.

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This is true of classical liberalism in general. The founders of classical
liberalism, people like Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is
one of the great exponents of classical liberalism, and who inspired John
Stuart Mill — they were what we would call libertarian socialists, at least
that’s the way I read them. For example, Humboldt, like Smith, says,
Consider a craftsman who builds some beautiful thing. Humboldt says if
he does it under external coercion, like pay, for wages, we may admire
what he does but we will despise what he is. On the other hand, if he
does it out of his own free, creative expression of himself, under free
will, not under external coercion of wage labor, then we also admire
what he is because he’s a human being. He said any decent
socioeconomic system will be based on the assumption that people have
the freedom to inquire and create — since that’s the fundamental nature
of humans — in free association with others, but certainly not under the
kinds of external constraints that later came to be called capitalism.

It’s the same when you read Jefferson. He lived a half century later,
so he saw state capitalism developing, and he despised it, of course. He
said it’s going to lead to a form of absolutism worse than the one we
defended ourselves against. In fact, if you run through this whole period
you see a very clear, sharp critique of what we would later call
capitalism and certainly of the twentieth-century version of it, which is
designed in fact to destroy individual, even entrepreneurial capitalism.

There’s a side current here which is rarely looked at but which is also
quite fascinating. That’s the working class literature of the nineteenth
century. They didn’t read Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, but
they’re saying the same things. Read journals put out by the people
called the “factory girls of Lowell,” young women in the factories,
mechanics, and other working people who were running their own
newspapers. It’s the same kind of critique. There was a real battle
fought by working people in England and the U.S. to defend themselves

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against what they called the degradation and oppression and violence of
the industrial capitalist system, which was not only dehumanizing them
but was even radically reducing their intellectual level. So you go back to
the mid-nineteenth century and these so-called “factory girls," young
girls working in the Lowell mills, were reading serious contemporary
literature. They recognized that the point of the system was to turn them
into tools who would be manipulated, degraded, kicked around, and so
on. And they fought against it bitterly for a long period. That’s the history
of the rise of capitalism.

The other part of the story is the development of corporations, which
is an interesting story in itself. Adam Smith didn’t say much about them,
but he did criticize the early stages of them. Jefferson lived long enough
to see the beginnings, and he was very strongly opposed to them. But
the development of corporations really took place in the early twentieth
century and very late in the nineteenth century. Originally corporations
existed as a public service. People would get together to build a bridge
and they would be incorporated for that purpose by the state. They built
the bridge and that’s it. They were supposed to have a public interest
function. Well into the 1870s, states were removing corporate charters.
They were granted by the state. They didn’t have any other authority.
They were fictions. They were removing corporate charters because they
weren’t serving a public function. But then you get into the period of
trusts and various efforts to consolidate power that were beginning to be
made in the late nineteenth century. It’s interesting to look at the
literature. The courts didn’t really accept it. There were some hints about
it. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that courts and lawyers
designed a new socioeconomic system. It was never done by legislation.
It was done mostly by courts and lawyers and the power they could
exercise over individual states. New Jersey was the first state that
granted corporations any right they wanted. Of course, all the capital in

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the country suddenly started to flow to New Jersey, for obvious reasons.
Then the other states had to do the same thing just to defend
themselves or be wiped out. It’s kind of a small-scale globalization. Then
the courts and the corporate lawyers came along and created a whole
new body of doctrine which gave corporations authority and power that
they had never had before. If you look at the background of it, it’s the
same background that led to fascism and Bolshevism. A lot of it was
supported by people called progressives, for these reasons: They said,
individual rights are gone. We are in a period of corporatization of
power, consolidation of power, centralization. That’s supposed to be
good if you’re a progressive, like a M a rx i st- Leninist. Out of that same
background came three major things: fascism, Bolshevism, and
corporate tyranny. They all grew out of the same more or less Hegelian
roots. It’s fairly recent. We think of corporations as immutable, but they
were designed. It’s a conscious design which worked as Adam Smith
said: the principal architects of policy consolidate state power and use it
for their interests. It was certainly not popular will. It’s basically court
decisions and lawyers' decisions, which created a form of private
tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state
tyranny was. These are major parts of modern twentieth-century history.
The classical liberals would be horrified. They didn’t even imagine this.
But the smaller things that they saw, they were already horrified about.
This would have totally scandalized Adam Smith or Jefferson or anyone
like that.

DB Let's make a connection between corporations and East Timor
and Indonesia. Nike is the world’s largest manufacturer of sneakers
and sportswear. It’s headquarters is in Beaverton, Oregon, right outside
of Portland. Some years ago they had set up factories in South Korea.
South Korean workers started unionizing and demanding better pay

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and better working conditions. Nike moved their operations to
Indonesia, where they pay workers $1.35 a day. Nike makes these
sneakers in Indonesia for $5.40 and sells them in the U.S. for $60,
$70, $80.

Indonesia has been a great favorite of the West, ever since 1965,
when a huge massacre took place. They slaughtered maybe half a
million or so people and destroyed the one popular political party there,
which was, as everyone from right to left agrees, defending the interests
of the poor. This slaughter was welcomed with absolute euphoria in the
West. I’ve reviewed some of the press coverage. Since Indonesia is a
pretty rich country, lots of resources, it’s what’s been called a “paradise"
for investors. It is a brutal, repressive state which prevents any labor
organizing or anything else, so wages can be very low. Indonesian wages
are now half the level of China, which is not exactly high. At the 1994
APEC conference, everybody went to Jakarta to celebrate the free
market. As part of cleaning the place up, they threw all the labor leaders
in jail. Some of them are in there for long sentences. Some of the
sentences have just been increased. They don’t tolerate labor unions.
There’s a Stalinist-style labor union run by the government. There have
been attempts to create independent unions, but they have been brutally
suppressed. So Nike’s happy, because the work force is — although
they’re very militant and very courageous — brutally repressed by the
state and kept way down. The country’s extremely rich. There’s a lot of
wealth around, mostly in the hands of General Suharto and his family
and their cronies and foreign investors.

Even the invasion of East Timor, as I've mentioned, was motivated to
a substantial extent by corporate robbery. A large part of the reason can
be seen in an important leak of diplomatic cables from right before the
invasion, around August 1975. These Australian cables first of all talked

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directly about the complicity of the U.S., of Kissinger ordering the
Jakarta Embassy not to report any more on what’s going on because the
U.S. was going to support the invasion, as it did. Of course they publicly
denied knowing anything about it The Australian Ambassador said, his
words were something like this, We can make a better deal on East
Timorese oil with Indonesia than we can with Portugal, the
administering power, or with an independent East Timor. In fact, that is
now exactly what’s going on. A few years later Australia recognized the
occupation, the only Western country to recognize it, in the context of
negotiations with Indonesia about the Timor Gap Treaty. There was a
big massacre in Dili in 1991 which did focus the world’s attention on
the occupation. A couple hundred people were murdered by Indonesian
troops who made the mistake of doing it in front of a hidden television
camera and beating up two American reporters. You're not supposed to
do things like that. You’re supposed to do massacres in secret while
nobody’s looking. They made that technical error, so there was a lot of
coverage for a while. Immediately after that — and here the coverage
declines, I have yet to see a word about it in the U.S., maybe in some of
the business press — Australia and Indonesia granted licenses to major
oil companies to begin drilling for Timorese oil. You have to recall that
the official reason given as to why East Timor can’t be independent is
that it doesn’t have any resources. That reason is given by the people
who are robbing it of its oil resources, which are expected to be quite
substantial.

As I mentioned, there is now a World Court case in process right
now — that you really don’t see coverage of. It’s on kind of technical
issues. The World Court isn’t going to deal with the question of whether
a country favored by the West is allowed to occupy and massacre other
people. That’s beyond courts. But they will look at the technical side.
The London Financial Times, a major business journal, just had a big

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article on January 30th timed with the opening of the World Court
hearing, describing it as one of the most important court trials ever,
because it is going to establish the basis for commercial exploitation or,
to be more accurate, robbery of the resources of a conquered people. It’s
a major issue. That’s quite apart from the fact that with U.S. assistance
Indonesia managed to slaughter maybe a quarter of the population, a
couple hundred thousand people. And it’s still going on.

DB I’d like to put readers In this office space for a moment. Your
desk is pretty neat right now. There are usually even higher piles of
books. There are at least six or seven piles, stacks of books and papers,
and on your filing cabinets even more. How do you divide your labor?
You’ve just been away for about two weeks. You come back and have
this avalanche of mail, phone calls, things to read. How do you get
through this? What are you prioritizing here? Is there an order to this
madness?

First of all, it looks remarkably neat now because while I was away
they did something really nasty. They painted and cleaned the office,
which I never would have permitted while I was here. So it looks
surprisingly clean. You may have noticed I’m trying to take care of that.
So it does look neater than usual. But if you want to know what it’s like,
you’ve been at our house. Around 4:30 this morning there was what we
thought was an earthquake, a huge noise. Our bedroom is right next to
the study. We went in and discovered that these big piles of books, six
feet high, a couple of piles had fallen and were scattered all over the
floor. That’s where I put the books that are urgent reading. Sometimes
when I’ve having an extremely boring phone call, I try to calculate how
many centuries I’d have to live in order to read the urgent books if I were
to read twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week at some speed

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reading pace. It’s pretty depressing. So the answer to your question is, I
don’t get anywhere near doing what I would like to do.

DB Just in the last year or so you’ve written introductions to Paul
Farmer’s book (The Uses of Haiti) on Haiti, Jennifer Harbury’s book
(Bridge of Courage) on Guatemala, the Frederic Clairmont book on
world trade.

And Alex Carey’s book, and several books of my own, a lot of articles,
plus all the linguistics, which is a totally different thing. On the way
back from Australia, it’s a long flight, about seventeen or eighteen hours,

I spent it all proofreading a very technical manuscript on a totally
different topic. Plus I have a couple articles coming out in Mind and
other philosophy journals.

DB Those long flights must provide at least a sense of respite for
you because you’re not bombarded with telephone calls and people like
me knocking on the door.

One thing that surprised me in Australia, and I hope it doesn’t come
here, is that they’re very high tech in some ways that we aren’t. So
everybody had a mobile phone. As we were driving around in cars there
were phone calls going up and back. One thing I’ve always liked about
driving, like flying, is that you’re inaccessible. But apparently not any
longer. Flying is very good in that respect. You're totally anonymous.
Nobody can bother you.

DB One of the things I’ve observed over the years of working with
you and watching you interact with others is a sense of balance and
enormous patience. You’re very patient with people, particularly people

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who ask the most inane kinds of questions. Is this something you’ve
cultivated?

First of all, I'm usually fuming inside, so what you see on the outside
isn’t necessarily what’s inside. But as far as questions, the only thing I
ever get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find
irritating. I shouldn’t. I should expect it. But I do find it irritating. But on
the other hand, what you’re describing as inane questions usually strike
me as perfectly honest questions. People have no reason to believe
anything other than what they’re saying. If you think about where the
questioner is coming from, what the person has been exposed to, that’s
a very rational and intelligent question. It may sound inane from some
other point of view, but it’s not at all inane from within the framework in
which it’s being raised. It’s usually quite reasonable. So there’s nothing
to be irritated about.

You may be sorry about the conditions in which the questions arise.
The thing to do is to try to help them get out of their intellectual
confinement, which is not just accidental, as I mentioned. There are
huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s
phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it’s possible for a human being to
be." A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think
about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot
of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative.
If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get in
trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or
cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus corporate
propaganda, plus television, plus the press and the whole mass, the
deluge of ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that
from another point of view sound inane, but from their point of view are
completely reasonable.

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DB You either have ESP or you’ve been looking at my notes, because
i was going to ask you a question about education. You’re fond of
quoting an anecdote of a former colleague of yours at MIT, Vicky
Weisskopf.

Vicky Weisskopf, who just retired, is a very famous physicist. One of
the good things about this place is that the senior faculty teach
introductory courses. He used to teach introductory physics courses.
He’s one of the most distinguished physicists of the twentieth century,
not a minor figure. The story — I don’t know whether it’s true or not — is
that students would ask him, What are we going to cover in the course?
His answer always was that the question is not what we’re going to
cover, but what we’re going to discover. In other words, it doesn’t matter
what coverage there is. What matters is whether you learn to think
independently. If so, you can find the material and the answers yourself.
Anyone who teaches science, at least at an advanced level, is perfectly
aware of the fact that you don’t lecture. You may be standing in front of
a room, but it’s a cooperative enterprise. Studying is more a form of
apprenticeship than anything else. It’s kind of like learning to be a
skilled carpenter. You work with somebody who knows how to do it.
Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t get it. If you get it, you’re a
skilled carpenter. How it’s transmitted, nobody can say. Science is a lot
like that. You just sort of have to get it. The way you get it is by
interacting. The same is true here. You go to a class in linguistics and
it’s a discussion. The people sitting in the seat where you’re sitting are
usually so-called students who are talking about things, teaching me
about what they’ve discovered. That was Weisskopf’s point.

DB At the Mellon lecture that you gave in Chicago in October, you

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focused primarily on the ideas of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. It
was very different from one of your political talks, for obvious reasons.
Not to say you’re not engaged in the political analysis as well, but there
was really a different tone and timbre to your voice. There was a
certain intellectual excitement when you were talking about these
ideas that really matter to you and from what you said influenced you a
great deal.

They did. Not so much by reading as by living. From about eighteen
months old, both my parents were working, and I was in what was
called school. It happened to be an experimental school run by Temple
University on Deweyite lines. So until I was about twelve years old I just
experienced Deweyite ideas, rather well executed, incidentally.
Progressive education isn’t what’s called that, but this was the real stuff.
It was an exciting period. Later I read the thinking behind it. I didn’t
read about it when I was eight years old. I just lived it. These were
highly libertarian ideas. Dewey himself comes straight from the
American mainstream. People who read what he actually said would
now consider him some far-out anti-American lunatic or something. He
was expressing mainstream thinking before the ideological system had
so grotesquely distorted the tradition. By now it’s unrecognizable. For
example, not only did he agree with the whole Enlightenment tradition
that, as he put it, “the goal of production is to produce free people,”
(“free men,” he said, but that’s many years ago). That’s the goal of
production, not to produce commodities. He was a major theorist of
democracy. There were many different, conflicting strands to democratic
theory, but the one I’m talking about held that democracy requires
dissolution of private power. He said as long as there is private control
over the economic system, talk about democracy is a joke. Repeating
basically Adam Smith, Dewey said, Politics is the shadow that big

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business casts over society. He said attenuating the shadow doesn’t do
much. Reforms are still going to leave it tyrannical. Basically a classical
liberal view. His main point was that you can’t even talk about
democracy until you have democratic control of industry, commerce,
banking, everything. That means control by the people who work in the
institutions, and the communities.

These are standard libertarian socialist and anarchist ideas which go
straight back to the Enlightenment, an outgrowth of the views of the
kind that we were talking about before from classical liberalism. Dewey
represented these in the modern period, as did Bertrand Russell, from
another tradition, but again with roots in the Enlightenment. These were
two of the major, if not the two major thinkers, of the twentieth century,
whose ideas are about as well known as those of the real Adam Smith.
Which is a sign of how efficient the educational system has been, and
the propaganda system, in simply destroying even our awareness of our
own immediate intellectual background.

DB In that same Mellon lecture, you paraphrased Russell on
education. You said that he promoted the idea that education is not to
be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water, but rather
assisting a flower to grow in its own way. That’s poetic.

That’s an eighteenth-century idea. I don’t know if Russell knew about
it or re-invented it, but you read that as standard in early Enlightenment
literature. That’s the image that was used. That’s essentially what
Weisskopf was saying, too. Humboldt, the founder of classical
liberalism, his view was that education is a matter of laying out a string
along which the child will develop, but in its own way. You may do
some guiding. That’s what serious education would be, from
kindergarten up through graduate school. You do get it in advanced

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science, because there's no other way to do it.

But most of the educational system is quite different. Mass education
was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of
production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t
know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of
resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also
understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we’re
educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don’t educate
them, what we call “education," they’re going to take control — “they”
being what Alexander Hamilton called the “great beast,” namely the
people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called
democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reasons. Because
the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes
and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

On the other hand, there are exceptions, and Dewey and Russell are
among those exceptions. But they are completely marginalized and
unknown, although everybody sings praises to them, as they do to Adam
Smith. What they actually said would be considered intolerable in the
autocratic climate of dominant opinion. The totalitarian element of it is
quite striking. The very fact that the concept “anti-American" can exist —
forget the way it’s used — exhibits a totalitarian streak that’s pretty
dramatic. That concept, anti-Americanism — the only real counterpart to
it in the modern world is anti-Sovietism. In the Soviet Union, the worst
crime was to be anti-Soviet. That’s the hallmark of a totalitarian society,
to have concepts like anti-Sovietism or anti-Americanism. Here it’s
considered quite natural. Books on anti-Americanism, by people who are
basically Stalinist clones, are highly respected. That’s true of Anglo-
American societies, which are strikingly the more democratic societies. I
think there’s a correlation there. That’s basically Alex Carey’s point. As
freedom grows, the need to coerce and control opinion also grows if you

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want to prevent the great beast from doing something with its freedom.

DB These qualities that i think you’re looking for and want to elicit
from your students, a sense of inquiry, skepticism, challenging you,
maybe just saying, You’re a nice guy but you don’t know what you’re
talking about, how do you foster those? You come in with a certain
amount of baggage into a classroom. People say, This is Noam
Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics and all that. Do you find
students are in awe of you or are hesitant to speak out?

Not most. Most of them are pretty independent-minded. And they
soon pick up the atmosphere around. Walk around and you’ll see. It’s a
very informal atmosphere of interchange and cooperation. These are
ideals, of course. You may not live up to them properly, but it’s certainly
what everyone is committed to. There are students who find it harder,
especially ones who come from Asian backgrounds. They’ve had a much
more authoritarian tradition. Some of them break through quite quickly,
some don’t. But by and large the people who make it into elite graduate
programs are that tiny minority who haven’t had the creativity and
independence beaten out of them. It doesn’t work 100%.

There was some interesting stuff written about this by Sam Bowles
and Herb Gintis, two economists, in their work on the American
educational system some years back. They pointed out that the
educational system is divided into fragments. The part that’s directed
towards working people and the general population is indeed designed
to impose obedience. But the education for elites can’t quite do that. It
has to allow creativity and independence. Otherwise they won’t be able
to do their job of making money. You find the same thing in the press.
That’s why I read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and
Business Week. They just have to tell the truth. That’s a contradiction in

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the mainstream press, too. Take, say, the New York Times or the
Washington Post. They have dual functions, and they’re contradictory.
One function is to subdue the great beast. But another function is to let
their audience, which is an elite audience, gain a tolerably realistic
picture of what’s going on in the world. Otherwise they won’t be able to
satisfy their own needs. That’s a contradiction that runs right through
the educational system as well. It’s totally independent of another factor,
namely just professional integriry, which a lot of people have: honesty,
no matter what the external constraints are. That leads to various
complexities. If you really look at the details of how the newspapers
work, you find these contradictions and problems playing themselves out
in complicated ways.

DB Do you find that when you’re doing these one-on-one’s with the
students in your office that they’re more open and communicate more
easily with you than in class?

My classes have a funny property. They’ve become a kind of
institution. There’s the Thursday afternoon seminar. The participants are
from all over the place, as we discussed earlier, including faculty from
several fields and many places and more advanced students who may
have taken the course officially before. Actual students are a small
minority and sometimes tend to be somewhat intimidated. The
discussions are mostly among faculty. What I've done over the years is
to break the class into two, so there’s two and a half hours of free-
floating interchange with everyone. Then everybody gets kicked out and
only the actual students are left. These are just discussion sections,
which the actual students run. I don’t have any agenda for them, so it’s
whatever they feel like talking about. That’s turned out to be a useful
way to run the courses to take care of this special problem that arose.

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DB In addition to your office being relatively neat and tidy, there are
also some additions to the photography section on your wall.

The latest photo has my three grandchildren sitting in a bathtub. I try
to keep the other side of life, something to look at that’s nice.

DB There’s a connection between my question and what I want to
ask you about. There is much talk now of family values and children.
You’ve been citing a UNICEF study by the economist Sylvia Ann
Hewlett on Child Neglect in Rich Societies. What’s that about?

That’s one of several interesting studies. That’s the best. It came out
in 1993. It has yet to be mentioned anywhere, as far as I know.
UNICEF usually studies poor countries, but this is a study on rich
countries and how they take care of children. She’s a good, well-known
American economist. She found, basically, in the last fifteen years, two
different models. There’s an Anglo-American model and a
European/Japanese model. They’re radically different. The Anglo-
American model has been basically a war against children and families.
The European/Japanese model has been supportive of families and
children. And it shows. The statistics show it very well, as does
experience. In Europe and Japan, family values have been maintained.
Families have been supported. Children don’t go hungry. Parents stay
with children. There’s bonding in early childhood because both
husbands and wives are purposely given time to spend with children.
There are day care centers. There’s a whole support system. The U.S.
and England, on the other hand, are basically at war with children and
families and have destroyed them, purposely. Purposeful, conscious
social policy has been to attack and destroy family values and children.

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So there are extremely high rates of child poverty and malnutrition, child
abuse, parents and children having very little contact under the Anglo-
American system. Contact time has fallen about forty percent over the
past generation, in large part because two parents have to work 50-60
hours a week to survive, to keep the children alive. So you have latchkey
children, television supervision, abuse of children by children, violence
against children, etc. The amazing thing about the U.S., and this is an
intriguing element of our intellectual culture, is that the people who are
carrying out this war are able to say that they’re defending family values
and nobody cracks up in ridicule. That takes a really disciplined
intellectual climate. The fact that nobody discusses it publicly — this is
serious research, not the kind of junk that’s called research — that’s also
revealing.

DB I’m getting a signal from your office manager to wind this up.
You’ve been citing some Hallmark cards that reflect these trends you’ve
described. Where did you get them?

I didn’t. That’s reported in the same study. As part of Sylvia Ann
Hewlett’s UNICEF study, the discussion of the breakdown of families
under the conscious social policy of the Anglo-American system, she
mentions as one sign of it this line of Hallmark cards, one of which is
intended to be put under a child’s breakfast cereal, saying, Have a nice
day, because the parents are out somewhere. The other is to be tucked
under the pillow at night, saying, Wish I were there. She gives that as
an illustration of what’s also shown by the heavy statistics. Incidentally,
this is not the only such study. There is a bestseller in Canada by a
woman who is a personal friend of mine, Linda McQuaig. She used to
be a journalist and became a freelance writer. She’s a very good social
critic. She wrote a book (The Wealthy Banker’s Wife) on the Canadian

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model. So it’s Canada-focused. But she pointed out, rightly, that Canada
is kind of poised between the Anglo-American model and the European
model, moving toward the Anglo-American one. She describes in some
detail what that’s doing to families and children in a country that used to
have a sort of civilized social contract. It’s eroding under the pressure of
the Anglo-American system that they’re a part of. The book was a
bestseller in Canada, but you’re not going to find it around here. My own
book, Necessary Illusions, was also a bestseller in Canada. It wasn’t
even reviewed here. There are other studies. And the facts are quite
dramatic.

I notice you have a newspaper article.

DB It's yesterday’s Denver Post. Of course, the obligatory Superbowl
coverage dominates the front page. But there’s a story on a new study
which reports that six million U.S. kids are poor and the numbers are
increasing.

Child poverty in the U.S. is just off the scale. Poverty altogether is.
The U.S. has the most unequal distribution of wealth of any industrial
country, and that’s been radically increasing in recent years. Poverty
among children is just awesome. In New York City it’s about forty
percent below the poverty line. New York City has as high a level of
inequality as Guatemala, which has the worst record of any country for
which there are data. People know what that means. Poverty among
children is enormous. Malnutrition is unbelievably high and getting
worse. The same is true of infant mortality. It’s unique in the industrial
world. And it’s social policy.

Take, say, family leave. Most civilized countries nurture that. They
want parents to be with children when they’re little. That’s when
bonding takes place and a lot of child development takes place in those

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early months, even neural development. It’s well known. So in a civilized
country you try to provide for it. The U.S. does not even have the level of
plantation workers in Uganda for these things. That’s part of the war
against children and families and in general against poor people that’s
carried out under the rubric of “family values.” The idea is, only rich
people should have state support. They have to be subsidized by
massive transfer payments, like Newt Gingrich and his constituents. But
poor people have to be smashed. Poor means most of the population.
Incidentally, it’s not only children who are suffering poverty, but also the
elderly, surprisingly. There was a big article in the Wall Street Journal
recently about how starvation, in their words, is “surging” among the
elderly, reaching maybe 15 or 16% of the population over sixty. Again,
that’s a phenomenon unknown in industrial societies, and indeed,
unknown in poor societies, because there they have support systems,
extended families or whatever. But we’re unusual. Civil society has been
basically destroyed. Family structure has been devastated. There is a
powerful nanny state, but it’s a welfare state for the rich. That’s an
unusual system. And it comes from having a highly class-conscious
business class and not much in the way of organized opposition.

DB I’m afraid I’m going to be thrown out of here in an organized
fashion. See you in a couple of days.

k k k

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February 3, 1995

DB / want to impress upon our listeners about how competent and
able we are. The other day we got off to a real Marx-like start, and I
don’t mean Karl. I forgot to turn the tape recorder on. Then when I did
the phone rang and then you spilled your entire cup of coffee on the
floor. It was a precious sequence.

I'll avoid that now by cutting the phone connection.

DB Just on a pile update, I see there has been some shifting of the
piles. The left-hand pile has grown considerably.

There’s a Barsamian thermos mug on top of one of the piles, which
helps.

DB And the piles on the file cabinets behind you have grown
significantly, just in a couple of days. Let’s continue a little bit about
Australia and what you found there. We did talk about East Timor, but
in terms of the Australian economy, are they also part of the neoliberal
paradigm?

Australia is the only country in history, I think, that has decided to
turn itself from a rich, First World country into an impoverished Third
World country. It is now unfortunately busily at work at it. Australia is in
the grips of a fanatic ideology called “economic rationalism,” which is a
souped-up version of the free market theology that’s taught in economics
departments but that nobody in the business world believes for a
second. It’s the ideology which has been forced on the Third World,
which is one of the reasons why it’s such a wreck, but which rich

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countries have never accepted for themselves. They’ve always insisted
on and demanded massive state intervention and protectionism, with
the U.S. usually leading the pack, since 1800. You can see the
differences. You go back to the eighteenth century and the First World
and the Third World weren’t all that different. They’re rather different
today, and this is one of the reasons.

Australia, which is in the Anglo-American orbit, and not a leading
power, obviously, is a small country. They have taken the ideology
seriously. They are doing what they call “liberalizing” their economy,
meaning opening it up to foreign penetration and control, and to the
main sources of capital in that area. East and Southeast Asia is a big
growth area in the world. In fact, with one exception it’s an enormous
growth area. The one basket case is the Philippines, which has been
enjoying our tutelage for a century. You’re not supposed to notice that.
But apart from that the area’s in a big growth boom, in pretty awful
ways, but nevertheless a growth boom. The source of it is mainly
Japanese and overseas Chinese capital, which are two big imperial
concentrations, although the overseas Chinese one is scattered. It’s not
territorially based. What they’re trying to do is pretty clear. They want to
turn Australia into their Caribbean. So they’ll own the beach fronts and
have the nice hotels and the Australians can serve the meals and there
will be a lot of resources that they can pull out. Australia is still a rich
country. In fact, at the time of the First World War it was the richest
country in the world, so it has lots of advantages. It’s not going to look
like Jamaica very soon, but it’s heading in that direction.

Since they dropped tariffs in this neoliberal fanaticism, the
manufacturing deficit, meaning the ratio of manufacturing imports to
exports has increased very sharply, meaning importing manufactures
and exporting resources, services, tourism basically. It’s moving in that
direction. It’s under very careful design, with a lot of smugness. Because

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the economists who studied at the University of Chicago and so on
probably believe the stuff they were taught. Business leaders have never
been willing to tolerate it for a second. But it is part of the ideological
fanaticism that is part of the technique for smashing down poor people
and sometimes rich people who take it on for themselves and suffer the
consequences. The same thing happened in New Zealand.

DB What was Australia’s role in the U.S. attack on Indochina?

Australian documents have been released up till the early 1960s and
we now know that the Menzies government, the government of Australia
in the early 1960s, was greatly afraid of Indonesia. That was their big
concern. That concern still hasn’t abated. They are on the edge of Asia.
They regard themselves as a white outpost on the edge of Asia. There’s
always a yellow peril concern, very racist. It’s being overcome now, I
should say, but back then it was very racist. They felt that they had to
switch. The British fleet used to be what protected them. But illusions
about that collapsed during the Second World War, when the Japanese
very quickly sank the British fleet. They realized that their protection
was going to be the U.S., so they better be a subservient client to the
U.S. As the U.S. moved into Indochina, they went along. They provided
not a huge amount of aid — it’s a small country — but they sent troops, so
they carried out plenty of torture, atrocities, and so on.

They did this for two reasons. Part of it was just service to the big
power, the big guys, who are supposed to protect them. But partly
because they shared the U.S. geopolitical analysis, which was very
straightforward, that there could be a demonstration effect of successful
independent development in Indochina. They were worried about the
same thing from China in those days. And that it could spread. It could,
as they liked to put it, “infect the region.” There could be an infection

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that could spread over the whole region. The way you get rid of an
infection is you destroy the virus and you immunize those whom it might
reach. And they did. They helped the U.S. destroy the virus.

The U.S. had basically won the Vietnam War by the early 1970s, as
was clear to the business community. Nobody else seems to be able to
understand it yet. In the region they simply supported the installation of
extremely brutal, murderous regimes.

The most important was Indonesia, where there was a major event in
1965. The CIA pointed out in its report, which has since come out, that
the slaughter that took place ranks right up with the Nazis and Stalin.
They were very proud of it, of course, and said it was one of the most
important events of the century. And it was. Indonesia was the rich area
that they were afraid might be infected by the spread of independent
nationalism. When the generals took over in the mid 1960s, General
Suharto, in what the Times called admiringly a “staggering mass
slaughter," destroyed the one political party in the country, the PKI, the
party of the poor. Everyone agrees on this. The U.S. records,
incidentally, have also come out through the 1950s at least, although
they’ve been very secretive about them. They’ve been very selective
about what they release. It’s a little unusual. It’s also been noticed by
scholars. But there’s enough there to know that what they were afraid of
was that the PKI, the major political party, would win an election if
there was ever an election. So therefore democracy had to be destroyed.

In the late 1950s, the U.S. carried out huge subversive operations
designed to strip away the resource rich outer islands in a military
uprising. That didn’t work. The only alternative left was this “boiling
bloodbath,” as it was called in the press, which very much satisfied the
U.S. There was total euphoria across the board. The same thing
happened pretty much in Thailand and the Philippines and so on. So the
region was inoculated. The virus was destroyed. Australia played a part

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in it Since then they have been incorporated into what’s called in the
U.S. the “defense system," the military system. So that’s their
relationship to the U.S. But they have a separate relationship to Asia.
That’s the relationship of increasing subordination to Japanese and
overseas Chinese capital that’s quite visible. For example, of the three
largest exporters, two are Japanese multinationals, which is the
standard Third World pattern developing.

DB Darwin, in his Voyage of The Beagle in 1839, wrote, “ wherever
the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal." How did
the aborigines, the indigenous population of Australia fare? Did you
have any contact with them while you were there?

Some. In Tasmania they were simply totally exterminated. In
Australia they were driven inland, which means desert. In the U.S., it’s
taken several hundred years. It’s just two hundred years for Australia,
they’re a young country compared with us — they’re beginning to
recognize aboriginal rights, the land rights issue, etc. There is an
independent aboriginal movement. Up till now there’s been extreme
racism, maybe worse than the American record. But it’s changing, and
now there are aboriginal rights groups. I was able to meet some of them.

I was invited by the Timorese, and they’re in contact with them. So
there has been some legal recognition of aboriginal land rights and some
limited rights to resources, but it will happen to the extent that the
popular forces press it, as usual.

DB There’s been a noticeable shift in the emphasis of your public
talks and your writing over the last decade. There’s much more focus
now on trade and economic issues. When did that occur? How did that
come about?

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It came about from the 1970s, when the issues shifted. Some major
events took place in the early 1970s, very significant. One of them was
the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, which we’ve talked about.
That’s one force that set in motion very substantial changes that gave a
big acceleration to the growth of multinationals. Transnational
corporations now have an enormous role in the world economy. These
are just incredible private tyrannies. They make totalitarian states look
mild by comparison.

The other huge change was the extraordinary growth in financial
capital. First of all, it’s exploded in scale. It’s absolutely astronomical.
There are close to a trillion dollars moving every day just in trading. Also
the total composition of capital in international exchange has radically
shifted. So in 1970, before the destruction of the Bretton Woods
system, which meant regulated exchanges, about ninety percent of the
capital in international exchanges was real economy related, related to
investment and trade. Ten percent was speculative. By 1990 the figures
were reversed. By 1994, the last report I saw was 95% speculative and
it’s probably gone up since. That has an extraordinary effect.

Its effects were noticed by James Tobin, the American Nobel Prize-
winning economist, in his presidential address to the American
Economic Association in 1978, so that’s in the early stages. He pointed
out that this rise of financial capital speculating against currencies is
going to drive the world towards very low-growth, low-wage, and,
though he didn’t mention it, also high-profit economy. What financial
capital wants is basically stable money. It doesn’t want growth. This is
why you see headlines in the papers saying, Federal Reserve Fears
Growth, Fears Employment, we’ve got to cut down the growth rate and
the employment rate. You have to make sure that Goldman, Sachs gets
enough money on their bondholdings. He suggested at the time a tax on

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speculative capital, just to slow down the rate of capital exchanges. Of
course that was never done. It’s coming up in the U.N. It will be
smashed, but it’s still being discussed, simply to try to shift the balance
towards productive investment instead of speculative and destructive
interchanges.

Incidentally, it’s had an enormous effect on the news business. The
big wire services, like Reuters and AP, which is connected with Dow
Jones, and Knight-Ridder, do give news, but that’s a secondary function.
The main thing that they do is interact instantaneously with financial
markets. So if Clinton is giving a speech, the AP, Reuters, and Knight-
Ridder reporters will be there, of course. If he says a phrase indicating
maybe we’re going to stimulate the economy, they race off with their
mobile phones in their hands and call the central computer and say,
Clinton said X. Then the guy who is manning the computer twenty-four
hours a day types off to thousands of terminals around the world that
Clinton said X, and maybe $700 million moves around in financial
markets. The three wire services compete to make sure they get there
first. I was told by a reporter who works for Reuters that every day they
get a record of how they rank as compared with AP and Knight-Ridder,
and it’s in the microseconds. You’ve got to get there half a second before
because there are huge amounts of money at stake. All this is
destructive for the economy. It tends towards low growth, low wages,
high profits. That’s essentially what the wire services are about these
days. Yes, there’s news on the side, but that’s slow stuff for us guys.

The telecommunications revolution, which expedited all of this, is,
incidentally, another state component of the international economy that
didn’t develop through private capital, but through the public paying to
destroy themselves, which is what it amounts to. This has been going on
since the early 1970s, but it really hit big in the 1980s, primarily in the
Anglo-American societies. So under the Reaganites and Thatcher, and

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with a spillover effect in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (it’s all
one culture area). You get this development we talked about last time of
the effects on families and children. That’s just one effect.

DB Where does the collapse of the Mexican economy factor into
this?

I just got a phone call a couple of days ago from a journalist in
Mexico telling me that I’m a big figure there now because they had an
interview with me in one of the Mexican journals (La Jornada, November
7, 1994) a couple of months ago in which I said this is all built on sand
and is going to collapse. It was pretty obvious. It’s what’s called a Ponzi
scheme. You borrow money. You use what you’ve borrowed to borrow
more money, and finally the whole thing collapses because there’s
nothing behind it. Economists who know anything about Mexico didn’t
miss it. It’s the ideological fanatics who didn’t notice it, or claim not to.

The free market reform, so-called, “privatization," which everyone
says is such a wonderful thing, means giving away public assets for a
fraction of their worth to rich cronies of the president. Every president of
Mexico, including Salinas, whom we’re supposed to love, comes out a
billionaire, for some reason, as do all of his friends and associates. The
number of billionaires in the Forbes list of billionaires went up from one
to twenty-four from 1989 to 1993 during the huge economic miracle.

Meanwhile the number of people below the poverty level increased at
roughly the same rate. Wages have fallen about fifty percent. Part of the
point of NAFTA was to undermine the Mexican economy by opening
them up to much cheaper imports from the U.S. The U.S. has an
advanced state-subsidized economy, so therefore you can produce
things very cheaply. The idea was to wipe out middle-level Mexican
business, keep the multinationals. There are Mexican-based

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multinationals. Keep the monopolies. Keep the billionaires. Lower
wages. That’s good for U.S. corporations. Then they can move over and
get workers at a fraction of the wage. It’s a very repressive state. You
don’t have to worry about unions and regulations. There has been a lot
of capital flowing into Mexico, but it’s well known that it was mostly
speculative.

As far as the rich Mexicans are concerned, they just export their
capital. They’re not going to keep it there. So probably rich Mexicans
lost very little from this devaluation. For one thing, they all knew it was
coming because it’s so totally corrupt that it was all known on the
inside. If anyone looks, they’ll find that Mexican capital probably went
overseas very fast shortly before the devaluation.

So it’s the American investors who are in trouble, big Wall Street
firms. One Mexico specialist, Christopher Whalen, very conservative,
who advises business, called the current Clinton plan a scheme to bail
out Treasury Secretary Rubin and his friends. The Europeans know this.
Just this morning the main European countries announced that they
were going to back off from this. They don’t see any particular point in
bailing out rich Wall Street firms. But it’s another one of those
techniques by which you get the American taxpayer to pay off rich
Americans.

This is essentially what happened to the debt crisis back in the early
1980s. Mexico had a huge debt. The debt was to U.S. banks, but they
don’t want to pay the cost. So it was basically socialized. When the debt
is moved over to international funding institutions, as it’s been, that
means to the taxpayer. They don’t get their money from nowhere. They
get it from taxes. It’s exactly what existing capitalism is about. Profit is
privatized but costs are socialized. If Mexico wants to develop, it’s going
to have to do it the way every other country did, by not closing itself
from international markets, but by focusing on domestic development,

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meaning building up its own resources, protecting them, maintaining
them. It’s got plenty. Not giving them away to outsiders. And they’re
going in exactly the opposite direction.

Part of this bailout is that Mexico is essentially mortgaging its one
major resource, the oil reserves. The U.S. has been trying to get hold of
those for forty years, and now we’ve got them. PEMEX, the big Mexican
oil company, is probably completely broke. It looks good on statistics,
but if any serious accountant took a look at it, they’d probably find that
it doesn’t have any capital. Because relative to other big oil companies it
has been doing very little capital investment. That has a very simple
meaning: you’re not getting ready to produce for the future. But they do
have the oil, and U.S. energy corporations would be delighted to take it
over. Mexico is going down the tubes. That’s what’s called an economic
miracle. It’s not the only one. It’s true of the hemisphere.

DB It was really interesting to watch how this played out in the
mainstream press. You’ve often talked about the needs of foreign
countries to satisfy Wall Street investors. Rarely have I seen it so
blatant as in this case. Mexico’s finance minister goes to New York ,
makes a case and the Times wrote, New York Investors Not Pleased
With Him. He goes back to Mexico and gets fired. Then the new guy
goes to New York, as did other finance ministers from Argentina and
elsewhere, and the line was, New York Investors Take a Liking to Him.

This one was so blatant you couldn’t conceal it. It was all over the
front pages. In fact, it was kind of interesting in Congress. The current
Congress is not really a straight big business institution the way the
Democratic Party usually is. It's got a mixture of very reactionary
nationalist fanaticism. A large part of it is based on phony business, like
yuppie-style business and some of it on the middle level, more

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nationalistic business. And they don’t like it. They’re not in favor of
bailing out the big Wall Street firms. So you’ve had opposition from
Congress and from people like Pat Buchanan and so on.

What’s happened here is very interesting. If people weren’t suffering,
if you were looking at it from Mars, it would be interesting to watch. Big
business for years has been trying to undermine and roll back the whole
social contract, the welfare system, and so on. But there are elections.
You can’t approach the population and say, Look, vote for me, I want to
kill you. That doesn’t work. So what they’ve had to do is to try to
organize people, as have other demagogues, on other issues, what they
like to call “cultural issues." So what they’ve organized is Christian
fundamentalists and jingoist fanatics and a whole range of extremists,
plus plenty of people who live off the government but pretend that
they’re entrepreneurial, like the high tech culture, all publicly subsidized,
but they pretend all sorts of entrepreneurial values. They’re all big
libertarians as long as the government’s paying them off enough.
Gingrich is the perfect example. So that collection of people is the only
one they can mobilize. It's not hard in the U.S. It’s a depoliticized
society. There’s no civil society. It’s been destroyed. There is very deep
fundamentalist fanaticism, widespread fear, a very frightened society,
people hiding in terror. The jingoism is extraordinary. There’s no other
country that I know of outside the Soviet Union where you could have a
concept like “anti-Americanism.” Almost any country would laugh if you
talked about that. But in the Soviet Union or the U.S. it’s considered a
totally normal thing. This is all a result of lots of corporate propaganda
and other such things.

But the result is that they’ve now got a tiger by the tail. It’s a little bit
the way probably Hitler’s backers in the industrial-financial world felt by
the late 1930s. The only way they were able to organize people was in
terms of fear and hatred and jingoism and subordination to power.

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Pretty soon they had these maniacs running around taking political
control of the state. The state is a powerful institution. We’re getting
something like that in the U.S. There is an anti-big business mood
among the troops that big business has mobilized. The reason is they
couldn’t mobilize them on any other grounds. You couldn’t mobilize
them on the real project, namely kill yourselves. That won’t work. So
they had to do it around other projects, and there aren’t a lot around. So
you get something like — I don’t want to draw the analogy too tightly,
because things are different — it has something of the feel of Hitler
Germany and Khomeini Iran, in which similar sorts of things took place.
The business sectors in Iran, the merchants, the bazaaris, the guys who
wanted to get rid of the Shah, they did organize Islamic fundamentalists.
And they weren't happy with the results. Something similar is happening
here.

DB Is that the major internal problem that you see for the rollback
crusade?

I don’t know how big a problem it is. The point is that the
concentration of private capital is by now so extraordinary and so
transnational in scale that there isn’t much that can be done in political
systems to affect it. The London Economist had a great phrase that
captures it. They were describing the elections in Poland, where the
Poles, not understanding how wonderful their economy is, voted back
the old communists into power. About half the population of Poland said
they were way better off when they were under communism. We know
it’s an economic miracle. They don’t understand it. The Economist
assured its readers that it didn’t really matter, because, as they put it,
“policy is insulated from politics." So in other words, these guys can play
their games, but there’s enough private tyranny to ensure what the

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World Bank calls “technocratic insulation." You keep doing the same
things no matter what these guys say at the ballot box.

Probably that’s true. If you look at the programs that are being
pushed through now in the U.S., they’re very carefully crafted to protect
the rich. The New York budget that came out yesterday was a very good
example. It’s worth taking a close look at. They say they’re lowering
taxes, but it’s a total lie. For example, if you lower state support of mass
transportation, that has one immediate consequence, namely costs of
riding public transportation go up. And that’s a tax, a very carefully
crafted tax, not on guys who ride around in limousines but on working
people. So in fact they will cut income taxes. In that sense, taxes are
being cut. But the tax system is getting less progressive. They’ll cut
taxes. But meanwhile they’ll increase taxes for the poor, the people who
have to ride the subway. Elderly people who are at home and can’t get
out and need shopping services, that’s going to be cut, which means the
costs are transferred to the poor. They’re not yet going after Medicare,
because rich people get Medicare. But they went after Medicaid, which
goes to poor people. Cut mental health services. The rich will get them
anyway. If you look at the budget carefully, it’s a very carefully honed
class warfare designed to crush the poor even more. I don’t mean
welfare mothers. I mean working people. I’m talking about eighty
percent of the population. Smash the poor more. Enrich the rich.
Inequality at the level of Guatemala isn’t good enough. They want to
make it more extreme. That’s the so-called populism, the fight for the
middle classes. Those are the policies that are getting rammed through.

DB A couple of months ago Labor Secretary Robert Reich said, If
you’re going to talk about welfare, let’s talk about “corporate welfare.”
How far did that idea go?

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He gave a talk which was well reported in the foreign financial press.
The London Financial Times had a big report on it. It was mentioned
around here. It was shot down instantly by the White House. They told
him right away to shut up. The Wall Street Journal had a nice article
about it a couple of weeks later, a good article, in which they reported
about the enormous subsidies being given to corporations under the new
Gingrich program, which they said was going to make boardrooms
delighted. In the course of the article they said, Well, Robert Reich did
make this speech about ending corporate welfare as we know it, but he
was instantly shot out of the water by the White House. It was made
very clear that no such plans were on the agenda. Quite the opposite.
We’re working for you guys, don’t worry about it. But it’s a term that’s in
the public eye at the moment, although as yet very little mentioned in
the U.S., and instantly silenced by the Clinton White House.

DB Robert Siegel is the co-host of National Public Radio’s All
Things Considered, in an exchange he had with Jerry Markatos, a
colleague of mine, in North Carolina, Siegel says that “attacking
welfare for the rich is a staple of mainstream Democratic rhetoric.
Chomsky’s observation about this is not exactly cutting edge stuff. ”

Of course, I've been talking about it for years, as have others out of
the mainstream. He may believe what he said. He probably doesn’t
know anything about the facts. These guys are just supposed to read the
words that somebody puts in front of their face. The fact is that
“attacking welfare for the rich" was shot down instantly. It’s not a
Democratic staple. In fact, the Democrats made it extremely clear and
explicit that they weren’t going to let this go anywhere. Reich was called
on the carpet for it. Siegel may simply not be aware of the facts, which
is very likely. And incidentally, the point that Markatos raised had

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nothing to do with what is sometimes called “corporate welfare," but
rather something different and far more important: the Pentagon-based
system of public subsidy for high technology industry. Apparently Siegel
missed the point completely, again, not too surprising since these topics
are not likely to be discussed in his circles.

DB But Siegel doesn’t leave it at that. Markatos asked him, Why
don’t you have Chomsky on NPR once in a while? He said he wasn’t
particularly interested in hearing from you and that you “evidently
enjoy a small, avid, and largely academic audience who seem to be
persuaded that the tangible world of politics is all the result of
delusion, false consciousness, and media manipulation. ”

He knows as much about that as he does about the staples of
Democratic political discourse. Actually, I did have a discussion with
him once, which was kind of interesting. A book of mine called
Necessary Illusions, which was on the media mainly, was based on
invited lectures given over Canadian national public radio. It was then
published and was in fact a bestseller in Toronto. I never saw a review
here, as far as I recall. But there was a fair amount of public pressure on
NPR. On All Things Considered they have an authors interview segment.
So under various kinds of pressure they finally agreed to let me have one
of those five-minute interviews. It was with Siegel.

I didn’t listen. But it was announced at 5:00 that it was going to be
on the next half-hour segment. People listened. It got to 5:25 and it
hadn’t been on. Then there were five minutes of music. At that point
people started calling the stations, saying, What happened? They didn’t
know what happened, so they started calling Washington. The producer
of the program said it had played. She said it was on her list and it
played. People asked her to check. It turned out it hadn’t played. She

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called me. I didn’t pay any attention one way or the other. She was kind
of apologetic. Somewhere between 5:05, when it was announced, and
5:25, when it was supposed to go on, it had been canceled by
somebody high up. She said that the reason was that they thought
Robert Siegel’s questions weren’t pointed enough. If true, the fact that
anyone even checked at that point shows how terrified the NPR liberals
are that some doctrinally unacceptable thought be expressed. She asked
me would I do it again. So I said sure. It's a pain in the neck going down
to the station. But I went down again. He tried to ask pointed questions.
You can draw your own conclusions. That they did run. That’s our one
interchange.

As to the audience, there’s some truth to it. It’s true that there are
some countries, the U.S. is one, the others are mostly Eastern Europe
and other totalitarian systems, where I have had almost no access to the
major media over the years. That’s not true elsewhere. First of all, there
are plenty of audiences in the U.S. I don’t have any problem talking with
the people I'd like to talk to. In fact, I can’t do a fraction of it. They’re
students, popular groups, churches, etc. But the thread of truth beneath
what he says is that in the U.S., as in Russia, the major media may
have been very sure to exclude not just me, but anybody with a
dissident voice.

You showed me the Markatos-Siegel exchange (Current, January 16,
1995) right after I came back from Australia. There I gave a talk at the
National Press Club, which was nationally televised (twice), at the
Parliament Building, I was not talking about the U.S. They wanted me
to talk about Australia’s foreign policy. So I talked about Australian
foreign policy to journalists, parliamentarians, officials, and a national
audience. I was not very polite, but very critical, because I think the
foreign policy is disgraceful. I was on their world services program
beamed to Asia. I was interviewed on that for about half an hour on the

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Timor Gap Treaty, a very important matter. All over the press and the
papers. The same is true elsewhere. I have articles and interviews in
major journals up and down the hemisphere, and many invitations from
leading journals that I unfortunately have no time to accept; I’d like to. I
just had an article in Israel’s most important daily journal, an invited
critique of their foreign policy. They don’t want me to talk about the U.S.
They wanted a critique of the so-called peace process. The same is true
in Europe. So as far as Robert Siegel is concerned, there are two
possibilities. Either he understands something about me that, outside
the Soviet Union, no one else knows. That’s one possibility. There’s
another possibility, that he resembles the commissars in a different way.
People can make their own decision.

DB Let's turn to one of our favorite topics, which is of course sports.
There is a major tabor action going on that a lot of people know about,
and that’s the baseball strike. Have you been following that?

No, I’m afraid not.

DB There’s an interesting component to this which i think you
should know about. The owners are demanding that their workers, the
players, put a cap on their earnings. But no similar cap is being asked
to be put on the owners’ ability to make profits.

That sounds like the norm. I’ll bet you without looking at it that most
of the population is blaming the players. I suspect, it’s just the way
media and corporate propaganda usually works.

DB That just played out here in Massachusetts. Governor Weld
wants to give money to the owner of the New England Patriots to

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spruce up the stadium and build luxury boxes and improve road
infrastructure and the like. There was a poll In yesterday’s Boston
Globe that most of the people want it. They think it’s a good idea.
That’s not welfare.

No, because it goes to rich people. This is part, again, it’s a matter of
people paying for their own subordination. Maybe it’s fun to watch
baseball games. In fact, I like it, too. But the fact of the matter is that
the way this stuff functions in the society is to marginalize the people.
It’s kind of like gladiatorial contests in Rome. The idea is to try to get the
great beast to pay attention to something else and not what we powerful
and privileged people are doing to them. That’s what all the hoopla is
basically about, I would guess.

DB Decatur, Illinois, is the site of three major labor actions. The
corporations involved are Staley, a British-owned company;
Bridgestone, which is the number one tire and rubber maker in the
world and is Japanese-owned; and Caterpillar, the number one
producer in the world of earth-moving equipment. At Staley there’s a
lockout. At Bridgestone and Caterpillar the workers are on strike. The
New York Times is calling this a “ testing field in labor relations” and
also saying that “in Decatur more than anyplace else labor is trying to
halt its slide toward irrelevance.

There is a whole long story here. The U.S. has an extremely violent
labor history, unusual in the industrial world. Workers here didn’t get the
rights they had in Europe until the mid-1930s. They had had those
rights half a century before in Europe, even in reactionary countries. In
fact, the right-wing British press, let’s say, the London Times, couldn’t
believe the way U.S. workers were treated. Then finally the U.S. workers

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did get some rights. It caused total hysteria in the business community.
They thought they had the whole country by the throat, and they learned
that they didn’t.

They immediately started a counterattack. It was on hold during the
war but took off right afterwards, with huge campaigns. There was a
nice phrase that one of the corporate leaders used. He said there is “an
everlasting battle for the minds of men” and we have to win it. They put
billions of dollars into this. In the early 1950s, when all this stuff took
off, business-made movies were reaching twenty million people a week.
It was a huge campaign. They had what they called “economic
education programs" to teach people what we want the truth to be.
They forced workers in plants to go to them. It was called “released
time." They had to go to these courses. There were millions of
pamphlets distributed. About one-third of the material in schools was
produced by the business communities. Churches and universities were
also targeted for subversion. Even sport leagues were taken over. The
huge entertainment industry was enlisted in the cause. For business, it
was a deadly serious matter. The anti-communist crusade was tied up
with this. That’s its true meaning. It was a way of using fear and jingoist
sentiments to try to undermine labor rights and functioning democracy.

The labor bureaucrats played their own role in this. Business was
worried at the time. By the end of the Second World War the U.S.
population had joined the general social democratic currents sweeping
the world. Almost half the work force thought that they’d do better if the
government owned factories than if private enterprise did. The unions in
the late 1940s were calling for worker rights to look at the books and
intervene in management decisions and to control plants; in other
words, to try to democratize the system, which is a horrifying idea to
pure totalitarians like business leaders. So there was a real struggle
going on. It worked through the 1950s, largely driven by anti-

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communism. During the 1980s the unions were really crushed.

There was a series of Caterpillar strikes. The first one was critical,
because it was the first time the government endorsed the hiring of what
they called “permanent replacement workers," in other words, scabs in
manufacturing industry. The U.S. was condemned by the International
Labor Organization for that, which was extremely unusual. The ILO is a
very conservative organization and they don’t offend their big funders.
But they did call on the U.S. to adhere to international labor standards.
Maybe Robert Siegel reported it on NPR. That was a major event. This
is the next stage.

They now feel, because of these developments in the international
economy, business tastes blood, they think they can roll back the whole
social contract that’s been developed over the past century through
popular struggle: labor rights, human rights, the rights of children to
have food, anything other than making profit tomorrow.

It’s important to remember that we don’t have a capitalist economy,
because such a thing couldn’t survive, but it’s quasi-capitalist, so there
are market forces and competition. In such a system you’re driven to
very short-term goals. Part of the nature of that kind of system is you
can’t plan very far. You want to make profit tomorrow. If you don’t show
a good bottom line tomorrow, you’re out and somebody else is in. The
result is they destroy themselves. That’s one of the reasons why
business called for government regulation a century ago, when they were
playing around with laissez-faire. They quickly saw that it was going to
destroy everything. So much of the regulatory apparatus was put in
under business control.

But now they’re more fanatic and they want to destroy the regulatory
apparatus. It’s clear what that’s going to mean. The timing was almost
delicious. Last December, when the Republicans were announcing their
moves to try to eliminate and demolish the regulatory apparatus by a

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variety of methods, which is what they’re planning to do, right at that
time there was a series of reports that came out about some of the
effects of having done this in the 1980s. One of the most striking was
right here in New England: Georges Bank, which has been the richest
fishing area in the world. They had to close a lot of it down. Now New
England is importing cod from Norway, which is like Australia importing
kangaroos from Turkey. The reason they’re doing it is that Norway
preserved its fishing grounds. They have a different “philosophy," as
they put it here. Our philosophy is to rob everything as much as possible
and forget about tomorrow. Their philosophy is to consider the needs of
the population, now and in the future. What happened is that the
government combined subsidies to the fishing industry with
deregulation. You know what that’s going to mean. You pay off people to
deplete fish resources and you don’t regulate what they do and they
deplete them. In fact, they’ve depleted ground fish. Whether they will
recover or not nobody really knows. Scientists don’t know enough about
it. But maybe they’ve destroyed the richest fishing area in the world
forever, or maybe somehow it will be able to recover.

This came out at the same time that they were announcing further
cutbacks in regulation. Then along comes the Mexican collapse. It’s
another example. Deregulate everything, enrich the rich, which is what
privatization is, and you can see what’s going to happen. And if
something goes wrong, turn to the public for a bail-out, because
“capitalism” requires privatizing profit but socializing cost and risk.
Incidentally, in the same weeks, NASA came out with new satellite data
announcing the best evidence yet, for a rise in sea level, which means
the effect of global warming. They also announced in the same satellite
data, that they traced the effect of the depletion of the ozone layer to
industrial chemicals. That comes out at the same time that they’re
saying, Let’s cut back the last residue of regulatory apparatus. But it

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makes a certain sense if the sole human value is making as much
wealth as you can tomorrow. You don’t care what happens down the
road and you don’t care what happens to anybody else. It makes perfect
sense. If it destroys the world, well, it’s not my problem.

DB We hear these horns and things in the background. Is this office
over a railroad track?

It’s actually a change from the way it once was. When I got here in
the 1950s it was an industrial area. The industrial plants have been
wiped out. The working-class living areas have been leveled. But at that
time we were between a leather factory, a tire-burning factory, a
chocolate factory, and a soap factory. Depending on which way the wind
was blowing, you had a nice combination of odors. Now it’s mostly
government-supported high tech small industries.

There are very few trains around. The reason is that the U.S.
government carried out probably the biggest social engineering project in
history in the 1950s, pouring huge amounts of money into destroying
the public transportation system in favor of cars and airplanes, because
that’s what benefits big industry. It started with a corporate conspiracy
to buy up and eliminate street railways and so on. The whole project
suburbanized the country and changed it enormously. That’s why you
got shopping malls out in the suburbs and wreckage in the inner cities.
It was a huge state social engineering project.

It’s continuing. For example, a couple of years ago, Congress passed
the Transportation Subsidy Act to give the states money to support
transportation. It was intended to maintain public transportation and
also to fill potholes in the roads. But the figures just came out, in the
same month of December, and it showed something like ninety-six
percent of it went to private transportation and virtually nothing to public

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transportation. That’s the point of getting things down to the state level.
Big corporations can play around with governments these days, but state
governments they can control far more easily. They can play one state
against another much more easily than one country against another.
That’s the purpose of what they call “devolution," let’s get things down
to the people, the states. Corporations can really kick them in the face,
and nobody has a chance. So the idea will be that you get block grants
that go to the states, no federal control, meaning no democratic control.
It will go precisely to the powerful interests. We know who they are: the
construction business, the automobile corporations, and so on. Meaning
whatever there is of public transportation is very likely to decline.

Yesterday’s New York budget is a striking example. It doesn’t say it,
but it implies increasing the fares for public transportation and
decreasing service, while making sure that the guys in the limousines
are doing quite fine.

So you hear a couple of freight trains in the background, but unless
they can be shown to serve private power, they’re not going to be
around long. Incidentally, one of my favorite remarks in diplomatic
history is in a great book on Brazil by a leading diplomatic historian, also
senior historian of the CIA, who describes with enormous pride how we
took over Brazil in 1945 (Gerald Haines, The Americanization of
Brazil). We were going to make it “a testing area” for “scientific
methods" of development in accordance with capitalism. We gave them
all the advice. He’s very proud of this total wreckage, but who cares?
Brazil had been a European colony, so their railroad system was based
on the European model, which works. Part of the advice was to switch it
over to the American model. If anybody has ever taken a train in pre-
Thatcher England or France and then in the U.S. they know what that
means. But he said this with a straight face. Another part of their advice
was to destroy the Amazon.

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DB When you were in Chicago in October, a woman in the audience
asked you, in a pretty straight-ahead question, how come you don’t
factor gender into your analysis? You pretty much agreed with her, but
you really didn’t answer her question.

In fact, I’ve been writing about it quite a bit in recent books in
connection with structural adjustment, globalization of production, and
imposition of industrialized export-oriented agriculture. In all cases,
women are the worst victims. Also in some of these latest articles. What
we discussed the other day about the effect on families is essentially
gender war. The very fact that women’s work is not considered work is
an ideological attack. As I pointed out, it’s somewhere between lunacy
and idiocy. The whole welfare “debate," as it’s called, is based on the
assumption that raising children isn’t work. It’s not like speculating on
stock markets. That’s real work. So if a woman is taking care of a kid,
she’s not doing anything. Domestic work altogether is not considered
work because women do it. That gives an extraordinary distortion to the
nature of the economy. It amounts to transfer payments from working
women, from women altogether and working women in particular, to
others. They don’t get social security for raising a child. You do get
social security for other things. The same with every other benefit. I
maybe haven’t written as much about such matters as I should have,
probably not. But it’s a major phenomenon, very dramatic now.

Take these latest New York welfare plans again, or the ones they’re
thinking about in Congress. One of the things they’re going to do is to
force women under twenty-one, if they want to get welfare, to live with
their families. Take a look at those women. A substantial percentage of
them have children as a result of either rape or abuse within the family.
These advocates of family values say either you send your kid to a state

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orphanage or you live with a family which may be an abusive family and
may be the source of your problems. But you can’t set off on your own
and raise children, because that’s not work. That’s not a life. You have
to get into the labor market.

All of this is a major phenomenon in contemporary American affairs
and in fact in the history of capitalism. Part of the reason why capitalism
looks successful is it’s always had a lot of slave labor, half the
population. What women are doing isn’t counted.

DB I’ve never heard you, for example, use the term “patriarchy.”
While not wanting to hold you to the fire with particular terms, is it a
concept that you’re comfortable with?

I don’t know if I use the term, but I certainly use the concept. If I’m
asked about what I mean by anarchism, I always point out that what it
means is an effort to undermine any form of illegitimate authority,
whether it’s in the home or between men and women or parents and
children or corporations and workers or the state and its people. It’s all
forms of authority that have to justify themselves and almost never can.
But it’s true. I haven’t emphasized it.

DB Are there any books by feminists that you read and value?

I sort of read it. What I read I sort of know, so I'm not learning
anything. Maybe other people are. It’s worth doing. I think it’s had a
very positive effect on the general culture. But unless you call things like
Hewlett’s UNICEF study of child care feminist literature — which I
wouldn’t, I'd just call it straight analysis — no, I don’t know it very well.

DB Russia has been a great success story. The military attacked the

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Parliament and it managed to win that battle, but what about the
awesome display of Russian military might in the Chechen republic?

My view has long been that the Cold War was in large part an aspect
of the North-South conflict, unique in scale but similar in its basic logic.
With its end, it is therefore not surprising to find that Russia is largely
returning to the Third World where it belonged and where it had been
for half a millennium. Right after 1989 not only Russia but most of
Eastern Europe goes into free fall, returns to Third World conditions. The
old Communist Party is doing fine. They’re happier than they ever were.
They’re richer than they ever were. Inequality has grown enormously.
The leadership is mostly the old nomenklatura, the guys the West
always liked and want to do business with now.

UNICEF just did a study just on the human effects of the so-called
reforms, which they approve of, incidentally. They estimated that in
Russia alone there were about half a million extra deaths a year by
1993 as a result of the reforms that we’re so proud of. That’s a fair
degree of killing, even by twentieth-century standards. The same
leadership is in control. Take Yeltsin, for example, whom the West
favors. He’s a tough old party boss and knows how to kick people in the
face. There’s the rise of a huge mafia, like every other Third World
country we take over, starting from southern Italy in 1943, but in fact all
through the world, there’s a major mafia.

Incidentally, Mexico, too. In Mexico under the economic miracle the
government is increasingly linked up with cocaine cartels. Jeffrey Sachs
made his fame, this guy who goes around telling countries how to save
themselves, by the economic miracle in Bolivia. But what’s usually only
pointed out in the footnotes is that Bolivia stabilized its currency all
right, but mostly by shifting to cocaine exports, which is perfectly
rational under the advice that he gave them of becoming an agro

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exporter. It’s happening in the former U.S.S.R., too. Huge mafia,
spreading to the U.S. because there are plenty of immigrants here.
Selling off resources. In Kazakhstan there are a lot of resources and
there are American businessmen all over the place trying to buy up the
oil. If a country that’s that well-behaved wants to carry out massacres,
the U.S. isn’t going to object. The U.S. hasn’t tried to prevent the
Chechnya massacres, any more than it did Saddam Hussein’s gassing of
Kurds.

DB Here I am with this barrage of questions partly written out. I’m
dealing with a loaded deck and you’re just sitting there. It’s like
Russian roulette, in a way. You don’t know what’s coming next. Are
there ever any moments where you’re thinking, He’s really missing the
point. Why doesn’t he ask that?

Your questions are so perfect, how could I think that?

DB You’re impossible! Any sense of maybe cutting down on your
public speaking schedule?

Actually, I have to cut down a bit this spring because I have some
extra teaching. I've doubled the teaching that I usually have. But not in
general. I have to think about what I’m going to do for the next couple of
years anyway. Retirement age isn’t that far away. But I’ve had too much
to do to think about the future.

DB In all these talks that you’ve given, you must have reached
hundreds of thousands of people, your articles, the interviews, the
radio, the TV. It must put a tremendous, not just a physical burden on
you, but an emotional one, too. Everything is riding on your shoulders.

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I'm concerned about that, just as a friend.

I don’t feel that way at all. I feel I’m riding on other people’s
shoulders. When I go to give a talk in Chicago, say, I just show up. They
did all the work. All I did is take a plane, give a couple talks, and go
home. The people there did all the work. I just came back from
Australia. Those guys have been working for months to set everything
up, and they’re still working. I went, had a nice time, talked at a bunch
of places. I’m exploiting other people. Actually, it’s mutual exploitation.
I'm not trying to be modest about it. There are some things that I can do
pretty well. Over the years I’ve tried my hand at a lot of things.

DB Like what?

I did spend a lot of time, believe it or not, organizing and going to
meetings, like in the early days of Resist, of which I was one of the
founders. I religiously went to all the meetings and sat there and was
useless and bored. Finally, out of all this a kind of division of labor
emerged by mutual consent. We would all do the things we can do.
There are some things I just can’t do at all and other things I can do very
easily. I do the things I can do easily. But the serious work is always
done by organizers. There’s no question about that. They’re down there
every day, doing the hard work, preparing the ground, bringing out the
effects. There is absolutely no effect in giving a talk. It’s like water under
a bridge, unless people do something with it. If it is a technique, a
device for getting people to think and bringing them together and getting
them to do something, fine, then it was worth it. Otherwise it was a
waste of time, self-indulgence.

DB Speaking of resistance, what forces can resist the right-wing

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onslaught?

An overwhelming majority of the population is very strongly opposed
to everything that’s going on. The question is, can they be successfully
diverted and dissolved and separated from one another? We talk about
having to teach lessons in democracy to Haiti. Anyone with a grey cell in
their head would laugh and collapse in ridicule at that. We have to learn
lessons in democracy from Haiti. Here’s a country in miserable
conditions, worse than anything we can imagine, with a population that
was able on their own effort to construct a lively, vibrant, functioning
civil society with unions and grassroots organizations and, without any
resources, to sweep their own president into power and create an actual
democratic society. Of course, it was smashed by force, with us behind
it. Nobody’s going to smash us by force. But if we could learn the
lessons of democracy from Haitian peasants, we could overcome these
problems.

DB Why don’t we end here and maybe you can make some headway
on these piles.

OK. (Chuckles)

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History and Memory

May 9 and 12, 1995

DB Here you are — / want you to be the first kid on your block to
have the new Nixon stamp. Speaks volumes for American political
culture.

The nicest comment I’ve ever gotten in the New York Times was from
William Safire about Nixon, remember that?

DB No.

I had written an article in the New York Review about Watergate. I
said I thought it was sort of a tea party and didn’t mean a thing and
compared it with COINTELPRO, which came out at the same time. I
said, Look, if you want to talk about something really serious, talk about
that. But Watergate was just marginal. So William Safire picked it up
and had a column about it, saying, Finally somebody told the truth
about it. Then I started getting letters from little old ladies in Ohio
saying, Thank you for defending our President. It was unusual praise
from the New York Times.

DB / want to talk to you about history and memory and, if you’ll
excuse the expression, how they’re constructed. The Czech writer Milan
Kundera has written, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle
of memory against forgetting.” In the context of all of these

History and Memory

anniversaries that have been coming upon us in waves, from D-day to
l f-E Day, there’s one in particular that I’d like you to talk about. August
6th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I guess
you were sixteen at the time. Where were you when you heard the
news?

I was actually a counsellor at a summer camp up in the Poconos
when the news came through by radio, I guess. We probably didn’t have
any newspapers. I was pretty shocked by it. I took off by myself for a
couple of hours and walked in the woods and just thought about it. I
came back and never talked to anyone because nobody seemed to care.
So it was just a sort of personal reaction.

But I must say that Nagasaki strikes me as much worse. Nobody’s
done much research into Nagasaki, so I can only speculate, but my
impression is that the Nagasaki bomb was basically an experiment.
Somebody ought to check this out, I'm not certain, but I think that they
basically wanted to discover whether a different mechanism was going
to work and used a city because, I don’t know why, why not a city? If
that turns out to be true, even five percent true, it’s the most grotesque
event in history, probably. Certainly the most grotesque scientific
experiment in history.

Whatever you think about Hiroshima, maybe you can give an
argument, maybe you can’t (I don’t really think you can) but at least it’s
not in outer space. I can't conceive of any argument for Nagasaki. And
then it doesn’t stop there, of course. There was that event which I wrote
about thirty years ago which I never see mentioned, although it’s in the
official Air Force history. It’s what the official Air Force history calls the
“finale.” General Hap Arnold, who was Air Force commander, decided
that to end the war it would be nice to do it with a bang, with a kind of
grand finale. What he wanted to do was to see if he could organize a

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thousand planes for a raid on Japan. Getting a thousand planes together
was a big managerial achievement in those days, sort of Schwarzkopf-
style. But he managed to get a thousand planes, and they bombed
cities, civilian targets, on August 14. This is described in a very upbeat
description in the Air Force history. It was after the surrender had been
announced but before it had been officially received. Then when you
move over to the Japanese side, there was Makoto Oda, a well-known
Japanese novelist who was maybe fourteen or fifteen at the time, living
in Osaka. He wrote an article which describes his experiences. He
remembers the August 14th raid and he claims that with the bombs
they were dropping leaflets saying, Japan has surrendered. That one
didn’t kill as many people as the atom bombs, but in a way it’s more
depraved.

In fact, speaking of memories, March 10th was a memory. It was the
fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Tokyo. That passed here without a
whisper. If you look at the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey after the war,
it points out that more people were killed during that bombing in a six-
hour period than ever in human history. The bombing of Tokyo virtually
leveled the city. It was mostly wood, so therefore they started by
dropping oil gel, which sets things on fire, then napalm, which was then
just coming in. According to survivors, the planes were just chasing
people. There was no defense. It was a defenseless city. They used
napalm to block the river so people couldn’t get to it. People did try to
jump into ponds, but then they just burned to death because the ponds
were boiling. I don’t know what the total was. It’s estimated somewhere
between 80,000 and 200,000, which puts it very much on the scale of
the atom bombs, maybe bigger. They so totally destroyed Tokyo that it
was taken off the atom bomb target list because it would have had no
effect other than piling rubble on rubble and bodies on bodies, so it
wouldn’t have shown anything. It’s just astonishing.

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The Far Eastern Economic Review, which is a right-wing journal run
by Dow Jones, publisher also of the Wall Street Journal,
commemorated it with a detailed article and a picture of what Tokyo
looked like after the firebombing. It’s unbelievable. There are two or
three buildings standing. The rest is just flat.

DB Do you recall what it was about Hiroshima that caused you so
much consternation? Were you aware of the implications?

The implications were pretty obvious. Even the little bit of information
that came across was that one plane had flown across to an undefended
city and dropped one bomb, which they then described and the number
of people they had killed. But it was obviously monstrous. That does
open a new era, no question. It means the destruction of the world is
well within reach, quite apart from the nature of this attack. I had had
various amounts of skepticism about the war right from the beginning.
The war against Germany was one thing. But this part was quite
different, in my opinion. Growing up in that period, you just couldn’t
miss what John Dower wrote about recently. The treatment of the
Germans and the Japanese was radically different. If you go back and
look at war films — these are childhood memories, I can’t be certain — but
my memories are the Germans, who were by far worse in everything
they did, incomparably worse, were treated with some respect. They
were blond Aryan types, whereas the Japanese were vermin to be
crushed. Plus all the story of the sneak attack and the day that would
live in infamy and so on, you can’t take that seriously, and I didn’t at the
time. Bombing Pearl Harbor and Manila is doubtless a crime, but by the
standards of the twentieth century, even by then, it’s just invisible. They
bombed military bases in colonies that had been stolen from their
inhabitants, in the Philippines by killing a couple hundred thousand

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people, and in the case of Hawaii by guile and deceit and treachery. To
bomb military bases in colonies that had been stolen from the
inhabitants no doubt is a crime, but pretty low down on the scale.

Incidentally, there are plenty of Japanese atrocities. Japan had
carried out horrifying atrocities, but that didn’t cause all that much of a
reaction. Nobody cared much.

In fact, right up to the end, there were negotiations going on between
Japan and the U.S., Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, and Admiral
Nomura, right up till Pearl Harbor, I think until a week before the
bombing. The main issue of contention was that the U.S. insisted that
the Asian system be an open one, meaning everybody had a right to
participate freely. So the U.S. had to maintain its rights in China. Japan
at the end finally agreed to that, but they insisted that this be worldwide
so that the Western Hemisphere would be open. Cordell Hull, who was
a terrible racist, considered this outrageous, as did other American
commentators.

This picks up a theme that goes way back through the 1930s. The
Japanese from the beginning, from the time they began to expand, this
particular phase of expansion, had said that they were trying to create in
Asia something comparable to the Monroe Doctrine. That touched a
nerve in the U.S., because there was more than a little truth to that. And
there were all kinds of efforts through the 1930s to distinguish the
Monroe Doctrine from the Japanese new order in Asia. They’re worth
reading. I reviewed them in an article (“The Revolutionary Pacifism of
A.J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War") about thirty years
ago. They are amazing to read, up till the end. They end up by saying,
How can they dare make this comparison? When we exert our power in
the Caribbean and the Philippines it’s for the benefit of people. It’s to
improve them and uplift them and help them, whereas when the
Japanese do it, it’s aggression and atrocities.

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If you look closely, one of the things I wrote about — I was just
rereading that article, wondering whether to reprint it, there’s a lot of
new scholarship, but as far as I know it changes nothing — was to review
recently released Rand Corporation studies of Japanese counter-
insurgency documents in Manchuria. They had carried out a campaign
in Manchuria and they described it in some detail and the Rand
Corporation released it They’re quite fascinating reading. It was very
close to what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam at the same time. They
professed no interest in any gain for Japan. The Kwantung Army, which
was running it, had a kind of social democratic rhetoric, in a sense. They
wanted to create an earthly paradise for the people of Asia, wanted to
save the people of Manchuria, what they called Manchukuo, like we
called our client state South Vietnam. They wanted to save the people of
Manchukuo from Chinese bandits and fascists and communists (the
Russians were right there) and give them a chance to develop
independently in cooperation with Japan. The same in China, where
they established a puppet regime, but under the control of a well-known
Chinese nationalist, certainly with all the credentials of the people we
were supporting in South Vietnam. And full of love for the people and
high ideals and anti-communism. I just compared it point by point with
what Dean Rusk and other people were saying about Vietnam at the
time. Aside from a stylistic difference, it wasn’t very different. It
translated very closely.

It’s kind of interesting. This article of mine has occasionally been
mentioned in the U.S., and it’s regarded as an exculpation of Japan. It’s
regarded as justifying the Japanese, comparing them to what we were
doing in Vietnam, which tells you something about the American
psyche. If you compare something to the horrifying atrocities that the
U.S. was conducting in Vietnam, then that shows that you’re an
apologist for them. How can anybody criticize us? What we’re doing

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must be magnificent.

Which raises another slight memory. We also just passed the
twentieth anniversary of the departure of U.S. troops from Vietnam. It
was interesting to see how that passed. Unfortunately, it’s just a broken
record, so I don’t even have to repeat it. But the complete incapacity of
anyone in the spectrum here, across the spectrum, of seeing that there
was anything more involved than a failed endeavor, that’s pretty
amazing. It happened to coincide with McNamara’s memoirs. That’s a
story, too.

DB / want to talk to you about McNamara in just a second. But was
that article in American Power and the New Mandarins?

It was reprinted there. It was originally in Liberation, the anarchist
journal. A.J. Muste had just died, and Nat Hentoff was putting together
a volume of essays for him. A.J. Muste was a revolutionary pacifist. The
framework of the article was, Let’s test his thesis in the hardest case,
when the country is attacked. Technically the country wasn’t attacked,
but let’s say the U.S. was attacked. In that case, does it make sense to
be a pacifist? He was. He thought we should not fight that war. Then I
said, How can we evaluate that position? I went on in some detail into
the background of these things.

The background is quite interesting. August 6th will be coming along,
and there is going to be endless discussion about the war in Asia. We’ll
just look and see what is said. For example, what is going to be said
about the comparison to the Monroe Doctrine? What’s going to be said
about the fact that the U.S. was pretty supportive of Japan right through
the 1930s? As late as 1939, Ambassador Grew, who was the leading
specialist on Japan, was defending the Japanese conquest in China. In
fact, the big debate then was, Are they going to cut off our access to

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China? What is going to be said about the 1932 Ottawa Conference,
where Britain, at that point unable to compete with much more efficient,
not cheaper labor, but more efficient Japanese production, simply
abandoned the laissez-faire doctrine, free trade, which they had
instituted when they figured they were going to win the game because
they were richer than anyone else? They couldn’t compete any longer, so
they abandoned it and closed off the Empire. For a country like Japan,
without resources, dependent on trade, for the British to close off the
Empire, meaning at that time India, Australia, New Zealand, Borneo,
Malaya — it was not technically closed off but they raised tariffs so high
that Japan couldn’t get in. The Dutch did the same in the East Indies,
what’s now Indonesia. The U.S. did the same. We were a much smaller
power then, but in the Philippines and Cuba, that was closed off, in
effect. And here is Japan saying, We’re latecomers in the game,
admittedly, but we want to play the game the same way you guys do. If
you block trade, we’ll just have to use force, the same way you did in
the first place. They specifically compared it with the Monroe Doctrine.
You can have any view you like about this, but to discuss the Second
World War without discussing these things doesn’t even reach the level
of idiocy. So we’ll know in a couple of months how much of this was
discussed. I think we can make a pretty fair guess.

DB It’s amazing to see how fifty years later Hiroshima is still such a
contentious issue. Recently there was a huge ado about the
Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum exhibit on the atomic bombing.
Subsequently the director resigned under fire from Congressmen and
veterans’ groups and other monitors of history. What is it that makes
this such a passionate issue?

I was involved in that. As you know, I’m a neurotic letter writer. I’m

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one of those people who signed that statement of historians saying, This
ought to be opened up to discussion. It can’t just be closed. It said,
Maybe the exhibit has to be criticized, but let’s have a serious exhibit
and look at the history. The Smithsonian backed off from that under
pressure from the American Legion and some veterans’ groups and so on
and political pressure, including by the Washington Post, which went
berserk over this issue. How dare you raise this question? Any question
that might indicate that we’re not perfect and they’re not devils? My
favorite article is by Charles Krauthammer. I hate to quote from memory,
but my recollection is that he said something about how what we should
have is the Enola Gay and it should be an object of reverence. In other
words, we should pray to this idol and revere it because it succeeded in
massacring people, and since that’s our job, we should not only accept
it but revere it, like a god. That’s the extreme.

After I signed that statement, there were about fifteen hundred people
who signed it, I started getting letters from outraged people. I wouldn't
be surprised if I was the only person who ever answered the letters. But
I did answer them, because I’m always intrigued. And besides, I feel you
ought to answer letters. So I answered them and got into some
interesting correspondence, which varied. At one point a piece of one of
my letters was published in some Air Force journal, with a violent
diatribe about these anti-American fanatics. The letters ranged. There
were people with whom I had a perfectly serious correspondence, for
example, veterans who said, I was out there at the time and I just
wanted to get home alive and I didn’t care what they did. Okay, that’s
understandable. I don’t agree, but we’re sort of in the same moral
universe.

But others were insane. There were people who sent me articles
written saying, History should be nothing more than a record of data.
You should show the Enola Gay, you should show August 6, period.

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Anything that goes beyond data is political correctness taking over. Of
course, they don’t believe that of anything else, but on this one they do.
And basically the theme was, We’ve got to worship the Enola Gay. There
is a history here, too. For years — I don’t know if it’s still true — at air
shows, the regular Texas air shows, every year the pilot of the Enola Gay
would fly a replica of it and thousands of people would cheer. There
aren’t many countries that celebrate atrocities like that.

It was rather intriguing to compare. The anniversary of the fire-
bombing of Tokyo was on March 10th. That was about three weeks
after the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, which was mid-
February some time. The bombing of Dresden was pretty bad. Nobody
knows, but I think numbers like maybe 30,000 or 40,000 people killed
are used. They destroyed a civilian city. They originally thought it was a
military target, but they apparently knew in advance that it wasn’t. That
was the British and the American Air Forces, under British command.
The British press had quite a lot of soul-searching about this. I haven’t
seen anything here. Britain was under attack at that time. That’s when
V-2 rockets were coming. Britain had, first of all, suffered, was
threatened, and was still under attack. They didn’t know until the last
minute how that war was going to end. If the Germans had been a little
bit more advanced with jet planes and V-2 rockets it could have gone
their way. The U.S. was never attacked. I think a couple of balloons flew
over Oregon or something, but the British are able to reconsider whether
the destruction of Dresden was legitimate, and we can’t. Because we are
perfect. We are holy. We revere our murderers because they are gods,
and the more people they kill the more godly they are. That’s our
history. One example is Theodore Roosevelt’s Winning the West , which
ought to be read by every student in every college. It’s just proto-Nazi.

DB Getting back to Hiroshima again, there are just a couple more

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things I want to touch on with you about that. You’ve heard the
traditional rationalizations for it. I’m sure they’re going to be repeated
ad nauseam in August. The bombing was a military necessity. Had the
U.S. invaded there would have been one million casualties.

I don’t think any serious historian even takes that seriously at all any
more. One can argue about whether it was worth doing or not. It’s not
an open-and-shut case. On the other hand, there is pretty strong
evidence now that they never considered anything like that level of
casualties. That’s a number that Truman threw around once in his diary,
but the actual numbers estimated (Barton Bernstein at Stanford has
probably done the most detailed work on this from the documentary
record) are, I think, about 50,000 or 60,000. Aside from that, there’s
no reason to believe there ever would have been an invasion. The
invasion was planned for November, and another one for the next May
or some months afterwards. But there was pretty good reason to think
that Japan would have surrendered by then. In fact, again, the Strategic
Bombing Survey said that Japan couldn’t have held out that long, atom
bombing or not.

Quite apart from that, there’s a question about the legitimacy of an
invasion. Why did we have to occupy Japan? Maybe it was right, maybe
it was wrong, but it’s not obvious. For example, the fact that Japan had
attacked two military bases in two U.S. colonies hardly gives us a
justification for occupying it. Of course, Japan had carried out plenty of
atrocities. But we didn’t care about the worst ones in the 1930s. We
paid very little attention. There was some criticism, some embargoes,
this and that. But they were mostly not because of the atrocities. During
the war Japan carried out tons of atrocities. The Bataan Death March,
the treatment of prisoners, and so on. But that’s in the context of the
war, and we weren’t too pretty either if you look at what was happening.

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So there is a question about the invasion of Japan. You can give an
argument for that, too, even from the Japanese side. There were plenty
of Japanese who, I think, wanted that invasion. It’s a complicated story.

One thing that the invasion did was it restored the imperial system.
MacArthur and the Americans purposely covered up Emperor Hirohito’s
crucial role in the war and the atrocities because they wanted to keep
the imperial system as a way of controlling Japan. And they did cover it
up. It’s a pretty horrible story.

But nevertheless, the invasion did undermine to some extent the
legitimacy of the imperial system. Therefore it created an opening for
Japanese democrats that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. So that’s a
factor. You can debate that. I should say that the net effect of the
invasion is a complicated story. Overall, it probably undermined
Japanese fascism and left some kind of opening for Japanese
democracy. On the other hand, it was a very mixed bag.

By 1947, the U.S. had undertaken what it called the “reverse
course," which meant in effect restoring the old fascist structures, the
zaibatsu, the conglomerates. They smashed up the labor unions, pretty
much what the U.S. did around the world. It started in Japan around
1947. George Kennan was once again instrumental in that reversal, a
nice record all across the board. But it’s a mixed story. If you want to
look at the invasion, there are many facets, including the question, Why
invade? But if it was agreed that we should have invaded, there is strong
reason to believe that the invasion would have been just an occupation
of a country that had surrendered, atom bomb or not.

Aside from that, there’s the question of the Russians. The Russians
came in, I think, around August 8. That was a terrible blow to the
Japanese. They could not withstand a Russian land invasion, and they
knew it. It’s very likely that a large part of the motive in the atom
bombing was to cut off the possibility of Russian participation in control

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over East Asia. The U.S. took a very strong line on that. We not only
kept the Russians out, we kept the British and the French and the Dutch
and everyone out. The Far Eastern Commission, which was supposed to
oversee Japanese affairs, the U.S. ruled with an iron hand. They
wouldn’t let anyone in. Kind of like the Monroe Doctrine. In the Middle
East at least the U.S. let the British in. But in Japan, nothing. There are
good studies of this. So this is going to be our show. And certainly not
the Russians. You can debate exactly the extent to which the atom
bomb was motivated by those considerations, but it was certainly not
trivial.

DB / was talking to Michio Kaku some weeks ago. He told me a
really interesting story. His parents were interned , as were tens of
thousands of Japanese-Americans. He said that the motive behind the
internment had to do with the rich agricultural lands that the Japanese
farmers had, particularly in California, and that these were confiscated
by the government and then handed over to agribusiness. Have you
heard that?

I’ve heard that. I’ve never researched it, so I can’t say, but I’ve
certainly heard it. I think that was the outcome. How much it was the
motive I don’t know.

DB / come from the Upper East Side of New York. There were a lot
of Germans there. The Bund was marching-around in the 1930s, in
fact, right up until the war, but one didn’t hear any calls for internment
of German-Americans.

I was in Philadelphia in a German and Irish Catholic neighborhood.
We were the only Jewish family there. The neighborhood was very anti-

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Semitic and pro-Nazi. I remember beer parties when Paris fell, and it
lasted up until December 7, 1941. In fact some of my dramatic
childhood memories are watching the guys who were cheering for the
Nazis one day come around with little tin hats and telling everybody to
pull down their shades the next day, a very sudden transition. But there
was no internment of Germans. It’s not that they were treated nicely.
The German POWs were sent to re-education camps, as were the
Italians, which was completely illegal. The U.S. had to keep it secret
because they were afraid the Germans would retaliate with the U.S.
prisoners. So they were renamed. At first they were called re-education
camps. Then they were called some other fake name. The idea was to
brainwash them, what’s called “teaching them democracy." They were
kept in the U.S. until about mid-1946. They were used for forced labor.
Some were killed. They were kept in England several years later. Did you
know Peggy Duff? She was the main person in the international peace
movement for years. Her first activity was exposing the British re-
education camps for German and Italian prisoners. We actually know a
lot about the German side of it, because the Germans keep very good
records. The Italians, nobody knows a thing. They were probably treated
much worse, because they didn’t keep any records. But you’re
absolutely right, there were no German-Americans interned.

DB Michio told me another thing in terms of duration. Some
Japanese-Americans, including his parents , were kept in the
internment camps almost a year after the war ended. There was
compensation much later, after many of the people had died. Again
with this issue, the question of memory: Politicians and pundits today
often cite World War il and that era as not only just the good war, but
there were no moral ambiguities. Right was right. Wrong was wrong.
Americans were united. There was great cooperation. People were

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making sacrifices. Is that how you remember it?

There is a lot of truth to that. During the war there was tremendous
unity. People were making, not sacrifices of the kind that the Russians
made, but you weren’t driving as much as you used to, and you
wouldn’t buy a new refrigerator, those kinds of sacrifices. And of course
American soldiers fought.

But there were plenty of moral ambiguities. The moral ambiguities
went before and started during the war again. So the U.S. and Britain
were very pro-Mussolini. Even after the invasion of Ethiopia the U.S.
accelerated its sale of oil to Italy in violation of the embargo. Italy was
loved. Mussolini was that “admirable Italian gentleman," as Roosevelt
called him. After the March on Rome in 1922 and the establishment of
Italian fascism and the smashing of the Parliament, the destruction of
the trade unions, the torture chambers, and so on, American investment
boomed. Mussolini was very much admired across the board, including
by the left, I should say. In the 1930s U.S. investment shifted mostly to
Germany. Germany became after Britain the leading recipient of U.S.
investment. There were very close relations between German and
American firms. American firms were participating in the Aryanization
program, the robbery of Jewish properties. The U.S. government, the
State Department, for example, was taking quite a favorable attitude
toward the Nazis at least until 1937. The line was that Hitler was a
moderate and we have to support him because he’s standing between
the extremes of left and right and unless we support him there will be a
rise of the masses. The British were even more favorable to Hitler. Lord
Halifax went to Germany in 1937 or 1938 and told Hitler how much
the British admired him. This continued almost until the war. Then, as
soon as the war got started, the first thing the U.S. and Britain did as
they started liberating the Continent was restoring the fascist structures,

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very openly.

DB Christopher Hitchens had a brilliant essay, in a recent Monthly
Review, on Munich. It’s always talked of as “appeasement.” He said it
wasn’t appeasement. It was collaboration.

I wrote him a letter after that mentioning to him some additional
documentation. It was as you say an excellent essay, but the truth is
even worse than he says. The documents are very explicit. They say, We
must support Hitler. It’s the same kind of thing they say about every
Third World gangster they support these days. It's the only barrier
against the masses, who will otherwise rise up and take away everything
from the people of property. So of course we have to support Hitler. This
goes right through to 1937 and 1938. The same was going on in Spain.
Basically the U.S. and Britain were kind of supporting Franco. They
didn’t openly support him, but the policies that they adopted were pretty
much pro-Franco. For example, there was an embargo, but Franco was
getting everything except oil. That’s the one problem he had. He
managed to get oil. How? From Texaco Oil Co., which happened to be
run by an open Nazi. The Texaco Oil Co. had contracts with the
Republic. It broke them. The ships that were out at sea were rediverted
to Franco. This continued right through the war. The State Department
always claimed it couldn’t find it, didn’t know anything about it. I even
read it at the time. The little left-wing press could find it. They were
reporting it. But the State Department couldn’t find it. Later of course
they conceded that it was happening. Meanwhile, some American
businessman tried to send pistols from Mexico to the Republic.
Roosevelt gave a press conference in which he bitterly denounced him.
He said, Of course it’s not technically illegal, but some people just have
no patriotism at all. On the other hand, Texaco selling oil to Franco was

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just fine. We just had a repeat of that in Haiti, which the press is still
sitting on. Texaco also sent oil to the Cedras junta with the agreement of
the Bush and Clinton administrations.

DB Let's keep on this theme of history and memory. Robert
McNamara is perhaps the epitome of “the best and the brightest”. He
has the number one bestseller in the country today: In Retrospect. He
writes, “We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who
participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we
thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our
decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.
We owe it to future generations to explain why. I truly believe that we
made an error not of values and intentions, but of judgment and
capabilities. ”

Actually, he’s correct about the values. If somebody tries to disobey
us, our values are that they have to be crushed and massacred. Those
are our values. They go back hundreds of years, and those are exactly
the values that they acted upon. His belief that it was a mistake —
personally I agree with the hawks on this. He’s been criticized by the
doves who say, You came around too late, and by the hawks who say,
Well, it was a victory. And the hawks are right. It was a victory. So it
wasn’t a mistake. He doesn’t understand that. He doesn’t understand
very much, incidentally. The one interesting aspect of the book is how
little he understood about what was going on or understands today. He
doesn’t even understand what he was involved in.

I assume he’s telling the truth. The book has a kind of ring of honesty
about it. What it reads like is an extremely narrow technocrat, a small-
time engineer who was given a particular job to do and just tried to do
that job efficiently, didn’t understand anything that was going on,

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including what he himself was doing.

But you’re right. There’s only one criticism that he sees, or that any
of his critics see, or even his supporters, the whole range of discussion,
including people who were very active in the peace movement, I should
say. I’ve been shocked by this, the people who are active in the peace
movement who are saying, We’re vindicated because he finally
recognized that we were right. It was an unwinnable war.

What about the maybe, if you count them up, four million
Indochinese that died, something on that order. What about them?
Actually, he has a sentence or two about them, and even that sentence
is interesting. He talks about the North Vietnamese who were killed. An
interesting fact about the book — and you can’t blame him for this,
because he’s just adopting the conventions of the culture that he comes
from, he’s completely uncritical and couldn’t think of questioning it—
throughout the book the “South Vietnamese” are the collaborators whom
we installed and supported. He recognizes that the population was
mostly on the other side, but they’re not “South Vietnamese." The attack
on them doesn’t appear.

The most interesting part of the book, in my opinion, the first thing I
looked at when I read it, is what he would say about the two major
decisions that he was involved in. He was involved in two basic
decisions. He implemented orders, of course. One was in November and
December 1961, when the internal resistance was overthrowing the
U.S. client regime after it had already killed probably 80,000 people,
eliciting internal resistance which Washington’s terror state couldn’t
withstand. Kennedy just turned from straight terror, which it had been
before, to outright aggression. They unleashed the American air force
against Vietnamese villagers, authorized napalm, started crop
destruction. They also started attacks against the North, which was not
involved seriously at the time. That was the first big decision. He doesn’t

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even mention it I don’t think he’s concealing anything. I don’t think he
thought of it as a decision. Because after all, we’re just slaughtering
South Vietnamese, and that doesn’t harm us at all. So why shouldn’t we
do it? Nobody’s going to get angry. Nobody’s going to harm us if we kill
South Vietnamese. So when we send U.S. planes to napalm Vietnamese
villages, what could be the problem? So that’s not even mentioned.

The second one is even more interesting. In January 1965 they made
the decision to escalate radically the bombing of South Vietnam. They
also started bombing North Vietnam at the time, February 1965. But
the bombing of South Vietnam was tripled in scale, and much more
devastating. That was known. In fact, one person who describes that
right at the time — and this is a very interesting aspect of McNamara’s
book and of the commentary on it — was Bernard Fall, a French military
historian and Indochina specialist. A big hawk, incidentally. It’s “we"
and “them.” He was on “our side" and that sort of thing. But he
happened to have a missing gene or something. He cared about the
people of Vietnam, although he was a hawk and a military historian who
supported the French and then the Americans. He didn’t want to see the
place destroyed. In 1965, he wrote that the biggest decision of the war
was not the bombing of North Vietnam, not the sending of American
troops a couple of months later, but the decision to bomb South
Vietnam at a far greater scale than anything else and to smash the place
to bits. He had also pointed out in the preceding couple of years that the
U.S. had been destroying the so-called Viet Cong with napalm and
vomiting gases and massive bombardment and it was a massacre. He
said in 1965 they escalated it to a much higher attack, and that was a
big change. He was an American advisor. He describes how he flew
with the American planes when they napalmed villages, destroyed
hospitals. He described it very graphically. He was infuriated about it,
but he describes it.

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McNamara refers to those articles. He says, Fall’s reports were
“encouraging” and justified the U.S. escalation. McNamara didn’t
mention the decision to vastly increase the bombing of South Vietnam.
That’s just passed over. Nor is there discussion of the bombing of South
Vietnam in general. He just passes over it without comment. He cites
Fall’s articles and says, Part of the reason that we were encouraged to
proceed was that Fall was a fine analyst and knowledgeable person and
was very impressed with what we were doing and thought it was going
to work. There’s a certain truth to that. Fall was saying, Yes, these guys
are such murderous maniacs that they may succeed in destroying the
country. In that sense, he thought it was going to work.

Then McNamara has a footnote in his book. He says two years later,
Fall had changed his mind about the efficacy of American actions and
took a more pessimistic view about the prospects for American victory.
That was 1967. Look at what he wrote in 1967. He said this just before
he died. He said Vietnam is literally dying under the worst attack that
any country has ever suffered and it was very likely that Vietnam as a
cultural and historical entity was going to become extinct under the
American attack. And McNamara reads this and says he changed his
mind about the efficacy of what we were doing. Not only did he write
that, but every reviewer read it. Nobody comments on it. Nobody sees
anything funny about it. Because if we want to destroy a country and
extinguish it as a cultural and historical entity, who could object? Fall
was talking about South Vietnam, notice, not North Vietnam. The killing
was mostly in South Vietnam. The attack was mostly against South
Vietnam.

In fact, there’s an interesting aspect of the Pentagon Papers , too. The
Pentagon Papers were not very revealing, contrary to what people say. I
had advance access to them, since I had been helping Dan Ellsberg in
releasing them, so I wrote about them in a lot of detail and very fast

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because I had already read them. But one of the very few interesting
things about the Pentagon Papers which I wrote about at the time was
the disparity between the planning for the bombing of the North and the
planning for the bombing of the South. On the bombing of the North,
there was meticulous, detailed planning. How far should we go? At what
rate? What targets? The bombing of the South, at three times the rate
and with far more vicious consequences, was unplanned. There’s no
discussion about it. Why? Very simple. The bombing of the North might
cause us problems. When we started bombing the North, we were
bombing, for example, Chinese railroads, which happened to go right
through North Vietnam. We were going to hit Russian ships, as they did.
And there could be a reaction somewhere in the world which might
harm us. So therefore that you have to plan for. But massacring people
in South Vietnam, nothing. B-52 bombing of the Mekong Delta, one of
the most densely populated areas in the world, destroying hospitals and
dams, nobody’s going to bother us about that. So that doesn’t require
any planning or evaluation.

Not only is it interesting that this happened, but also interesting is
the fact that no one noticed it. I wrote about it, but I have yet to find any
commentator, scholar, or anyone else, who noticed this fact about the
Pentagon Papers. And you see that in the contemporary discussion. We
were “defending” South Vietnam, namely the country that we were
destroying. The very fact McNamara can say that and quote Bernard
Fall, who was the most knowledgeable person, who was utterly
infuriated and outraged over this assault against South Vietnam, even
though he was a hawk, who thought Saigon ought to rule the whole
country — you can quote him and not see that that’s what he’s saying —
that reveals a degree of moral blindness, not just in McNamara, but in
the whole culture, that surpasses comment.

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DB Just a couple more things on McNamara and his mea culpa.
He’s sort of taken the Nazi Nuremberg defense, following orders,
allegiance to the FOhrer, that’s why he didn’t speak out while he was
Secretary of Defense.

I don’t agree. He does not recognize that anything wrong was done.
So there’s no question of a defense.

DB On MacNeil-Lehrer, he now says he had misgivings about the
policies.

What were the misgivings? The misgivings were that it might not
succeed. Suppose that some Nazi general came around after Stalingrad
and said, I realized after Stalingrad it was a mistake to fight a two-front
war, but I did it anyway. That’s not the Nuremberg defense. That’s not
even recognizing that a crime was committed. You’ve got to recognize
that a crime was committed before you give a defense. McNamara can’t
perceive that. Furthermore, I don’t say that as a criticism of McNamara.
He is a dull, narrow technocrat who questioned nothing. He simply
accepted the framework of beliefs of the people around him and that’s
their framework. That’s the Kennedy liberals. We cannot commit a
crime. It’s a contradiction in terms. Anything we do is by necessity not
only right, but noble. Therefore there can’t be a crime.

If you look at his mea culpa, he’s apologizing to the American people.
He sent American soldiers to fight an unwinnable war, which he thought
early on was unwinnable. The cost was to the U.S. It tore the country
apart. It left people disillusioned and skeptical of the government. That’s
the cost. Yes, there were those 3 million or more Vietnamese who got
killed. The Cambodians and Laotians are totally missing from his story.
There were a million or so of them. There’s no apology to them.

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It’s dramatic to see how this is paired once again — I’ve been writing
about this for years — with discussions of the inability of the Japanese to
give a fully adequate apology for what they did during the Second World
War. The Prime Minister of Japan has just been in China, where he
apologized profusely for the atrocities that Japan carried out and the
suffering of the people of Asia caused by Japanese aggression. That’s
been discussed in the New York Times, critically. Because, well, yeah,
sure, he said it, but there are some Japanese parliamentarians who
think he shouldn’t have said it, so that the Japanese are still unwilling to
face up to what they did. Next column over, we’re facing up to the fact
that we harmed the U.S. by destroying three countries and killing
millions of people. It’s pretty interesting. I don’t think any country in
history could have exhibited this shocking force on the front page
without comment. Incidentally, there’s no comment in the whole West.
It’s not just the U.S. In the British and the European press, to the extent
I read it, it’s exactly the same. This is part of Western culture. It’s what
Adam Smith called the “savage injustice of the Europeans," which
already in his day was destroying much of the world.

DB Long before McNamara wrote this book you had compared him
to Lenin. What did you mean by that?

I compared some passages of articles of his in the late 1960s,
speeches, on management and the necessity of management, how a
well-managed society controlled from above was the ultimate in
freedom. The reason is if you have really good management and
everything’s under control and people are told what to do, under those
conditions, he said, man can maximize his potential. I just compared
that with standard Leninist views on vanguard parties, which are about
the same. About the only difference is that McNamara brought God in,

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and I suppose Lenin didn’t bring God in. He brought Marx in.

DB The Times the day before yesterday had a front-page story: “The
Radical Right Has an Unlikely Soulmate In the Leftist Politics of the
Sixties.” It states: “There is a sense that the Vietnam era war turmoil
tore a hole in the post-World War II social fabric and that although it
was the left that opened the rift, it was the right that has driven a truck
through it. " What do you think the newspaper of record has in mind in
comparing the sixties with what’s happening in the nineties?

That makes perfect sense from their point of view. Since everything
the U.S. does is by necessity correct, except maybe it fails, or maybe it
costs us too much, but otherwise it is by necessity correct, therefore the
Vietnam War was of necessity correct and legitimate, except maybe for
its failures, and the left was criticizing and therefore opened up this rift.

I doubt if Pravda would have gotten to this level, but maybe it would
have. Suppose you had read Pravda about the invasion of Afghanistan,
which was criticized. They say, You’ve got these critics, like Sakharov
and these people, who are tearing a hole in the body politic by
undermining Russian authority by saying we shouldn’t defend the people
of Afghanistan from terror. I suppose you can imagine that appearing in
Pravda. I don’t know for certain that it did. If so, Pravda would have
descended to the level of the New York Times, which sees it exactly that
way. They saw it that way at the time, as did the leading doves, who
questioned the war because of its apparent failures and its costs,
primarily its costs to us. By those standards, no one had a right to
criticize the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: it worked, and casualties
were very few. Virtually no one in the mainstream was capable of even
imagining the position that everyone took in the case of Czechoslovakia:
aggression is wrong, even if it succeeds and at a small cost. The

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criticisms were so tepid they were embarrassing. Almost nobody,
including me, dared to criticize the U.S. attack on South Vietnam. That’s
like talking Hittite. Nobody even understood the words. They still don’t.
But from their point of view it’s true. Actions taken to try to stop a
murderous aggressive war that was massacring people and destroying
three countries — that’s tearing wide the body politic, and now the right
can drive a truck through it. So, yes, that’s the picture.

DB You usually have the last word, but I’m going to say something
here at the end. i want to just read you this quote. "During these last
three decades, all my thoughts and actions in my entire life have been
moved solely by the love and fidelity I feel for my people. This has
given me the strength to make the most difficult of decisions, the like
of which no mortal has ever made before.” Have a sense of where that
comes from?

Himmler?

DB It’s Hitler.

k k k

May 12, 1995

DB I'm going to pick up the thread from the other day. We talked
about history and memory, i just want to get a little closure to that. In
general, who are the gatekeepers of history?

Historians, of course. The educated classes in general. Part of their
task is to shape our picture of the past in a way which is supportive of

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power interests in the present. If they don’t do that, they probably will
get marginalized in one way or another.

DB How about some suggestions for people in terms of decoding
and deciphering the propaganda? Are there any kinds of practical
techniques? It’s a tough question.

I actually think it’s a simple question. Use your common sense. You
can point to examples. When you read a headline in the Wall Street
Journal that says “American Oil Companies Fear Loss of Jobs in the
Middle East," it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that “jobs" is being
used to mean “profits.” When you read the account of the New York tax
system which says they’re cutting down subsidies to mass transit, you
can quickly understand that subsidies means gifts from people to
themselves. What they’re doing is increasing taxes. You can go on and
on, case by case. But there’s no trick other than just using your sense.

DB Can you recommend some basic books for people?

There are things that are helpful, like Howard Zinn’s People’s
History, for example. It’s a good start to give you a picture of the world
that’s different from the one you learned at school. It’s very accurate.
And then it’s on from there. I hate to give suggestions. You just have to
do what’s called “triangulating." You try to look at the world from
different perspectives. You’re getting one perspective drilled into your
head all the time, so you don’t need any more of that one. But look at
other ones. There are others. There are independent journals, dissident
scholarly literature, all sorts of things. One of the reasons I give rich
footnotes is to answer that question, because a lot of people want to
know. There are things I think are instructive, but you have to decide for

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yourself what’s interesting for you.

DB Jumping into the present and the political climate, you have
likened it to Germany and Iran. What do you mean by that?

I was referring to a specific phenomenon that’s becoming visible.
How important it is is not entirely clear. But if you look at Germany in
the late 1930s, or Iran around 1980, which is what I was talking about,
there were big centers of power. In Germany it was the big industrialists.
In Iran it was the bazaaris, the merchant class. They had an enemy in
both cases. In the case of the big industrialists in Germany, it was the
working class. They wanted to destroy the working class organizations.
In the case of Iran, it was the Shah. They had helped in the organization
of popular forces to overcome their enemies. In Germany it was the Nazi
party. In Iran it was the fundamentalists. Then they both discovered
something. The guys they had organized had ideas of their own, as did
their leaders, and they weren’t necessarily their ideas. So by the late
1930s, a lot of German industrialists were quite worried that they had a
tiger by the tail in the case of Hitler. In Iran, they just lost. The
fundamentalists took over and booted them out.

If you look at the U.S. now, the Fortune 500, the real big business,
they are just euphoric. Social policy has been designed to enrich them
beyond their wildest dreams. The annual issue of Fortune devoted to the
Fortune 500, which just came out this week, reports profits up 54%
over last year on barely rising sales and virtually flat employment. This is
the fourth straight year of double-digit profit growth, which is just
unheard of. They expect it to continue. So they’re euphoric. They like a
lot of this stuff. Most of what’s going on in Congress they just love. It’s
all putting money in their pockets and smashing everyone else.

But they’re also worried. They can read the headlines, which tell

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them that these Gingrich freshmen congressmen are anti-big business,
which is true. They don’t like big business. They like what they call
“small business," which is not so small. The big plutocrats are what
they don’t like, because they don’t distinguish them from big
bureaucrats. A lot of their policies are of a kind which real corporate
power is not very happy about. In part that’s true of what they call the
“cultural scene." The only way they could mobilize their troops — you
can’t organize people if you say, Join me, I’m going to smash you in the
face. So the way you do it is say, Join me, and because you can hate
your neighbor, put black teenagers in jail, or you’ll have religion, you
organize people on the basis of fanaticism and extremism and hysteria
and fear and then those people have their own ideas. There’s no
question that there is a lot of concern about this. You can see it again in
places like Fortune magazine.

DB Let’s look at just some of the rhetoric today. These are quotes:
“jackbooted government thugs,” “The final war has begun,” “Death to
the new world order, " “feminazis, " and “environmental wackos. " People
like G. Gordon Liddy on his radio talk show are advising listeners on
how to kill federal agents: “Head shots, head shots, . . . kill the sons of
bitches.” And Newt Gingrich saying that Democrats are “the enemy of
normal Americans.”

That’s the kind of talk that does trouble the CEOs. George Bush wrote
a very angry letter resigning from the NRA for that kind of reason. He’s
an old-fashioned sort of Eisenhower Republican, a corporate flack, and
he doesn’t think they should be going around talking about killing federal
agents. But more important than that, these people are worried. Right
now Newt Gingrich can say anything he likes about Democrats as long
as he maintains funding for the Pentagon, which is the big cash cow for

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a large part of corporate America, including Newt Gingrich. But you can
never tell when it’s going to get out of hand. And I suppose Newt
Gingrich is worried that it’s going to get out of hand. He’s enough of a
slave to big business to worry about the fact that the guys that he’s
organizing can go off half-cocked from his point of view.

There’s an interesting story about that in this morning’s Globe. Take a
look at it before you leave. They have a columnist called David
Shribman, who’s their rising hotshot. He just won a Pulitzer Prize. He’s
their political columnist now, to the left-liberal side by American
standards. He has an article about Newt Gingrich. He says, We liberals
have been misunderstanding him. He’s not anti-government the way
these fruitcakes are. He is in favor of government. But he wants
government to do the right thing. So he wants government to be around
to give laptop computers to the poor and all sorts of nice stuff. He just
doesn’t want a lot of crazy bureaucrats hampering initiatives. So he’s
really on our side. He quotes Michael Kazin, a left writer, saying that
Gingrich is our kind of guy, a populist. He says that Gingrich is in favor
of independence and entrepreneurial values and wants the government
to stimulate that. The only thing he doesn’t mention is that Gingrich
insists that the government fund private enterprise. He himself
represents Cobb County, which gets more federal subsidies than all but
two suburban counties in the U.S. That’s not mentioned. The reason is
the class interest of suppressing the role of the government in tunneling
funds from the poor to the rich. That has to be suppressed, even at the
left-liberal side. But meanwhile they do recognize that Gingrich is more
committed to rational corporate power than a lot of the people that he’s
organized, who are dangerous and who could destroy things that they
care about.

DB Anthony Lewis, today or yesterday in the Times, got it wrong,

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though. He said that Cobb County in Georgia receives more federal
funding than any other county in the country.

That’s incorrect. But finally they’re sort of noticing. However, what’s
interesting is that this is suppression of the fact. To be able to suppress
this all this time is astonishing. The suppression reflects the class
interests. What Shribman's article indicates is that they recognize that
they want to support what they see as a Gingrich-style Republicanism,
which will indeed rely on huge state power to fund the rich, but not
destroy the instruments of that power.

DB Getting back to history and memory and the consequences of
vitriolic speech, there was some notice of the Kent State killings after
twenty-five years. Incidentally, no mention of Jackson State, in
Mississippi, where two African-Americans were killed. If you recall the
atmosphere, Nixon calling students "bums” and the Governor of Ohio,
James Rhodes, the day before the shootings at Kent State, said, "We
are going to eradicate the problem. These people just move from one
campus to another and paralyze the community. They are worse than
brownshirts, and also they’re worse than the night riders and
vigilantes.” The next day were the killings.

That’s true, and I'd worry about the kind of quotes you talk about,
but I think that that’s barely the icing on the cake. The quadrennial
analysis of public attitudes by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
just came out. Among other things, they investigate what people think is
the most serious problem facing the country. By a long shot, it’s crime.
Where did that come from? What does crime mean? And drugs are way
high up. The OECD just did a study of drug money, about half a trillion
dollars profit a year, they estimate. Over half of that passes through U.S.

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banks. Is that what they’re talking about? Is that the crime and drugs
people worry about? No. It’s like you say, the black teenager. Has that
kind of crime gone up? No, as far as we can tell. In fact, most of what
they’re calling crime is a kid caught with a joint in his pocket. Why do
people think of that as the problem? That’s not because of Rush
Limbaugh. That’s because of the mainstream commentary, which has
stimulated fear of crime and shaped it in a very special sense to mean
those superfluous people out there who are the wrong color and have
the wrong genes. That’s what you’ve got to be afraid of. That’s a lot
more important than Rush Limbaugh saying “feminazis."

DB Conspiracy theories are nothing new in American history.
Richard Hofstadter has written about The Paranoid style in American
Politics. But there seems to me to be a difference now in terms of the
instruments of purveying these theories. They have media. They have
radio. People listen to it.

That’s true, but I still feel that I'm more worried about the New York
Times and the Boston Globe than I am about Rush Limbaugh. So I think
that with all the crazed lunacy about black helicopters, the U.N., and
the Council on Foreign Relations, it doesn’t begin to have the damaging
effect of the way they shape public perceptions on issues like crime or
like alleged free-market programs or welfare. That’s far more dangerous.
For example, Americans feel that they’re being over-taxed to pay black
mothers. In fact, our welfare system is miserly. It’s gone down very
sharply in the last twenty years. We’re undertaxed. Those are things that
really matter.

DB In Language and Responsibility, in a discussion about FBI
COINTELPRO operations and Watergate, you say that “one of the keys

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to the whole thing (is that) everyone is led to think that what he knows
represents a local exception. But the overall pattern remains hidden.”
Is there a subtext to the Oklahoma City bombing there?

I’m not sure exactly what you had in mind. In what sense?

DB What’s going on underneath?

The U.S. wants to be able to carry out Oklahoma City bombings in
other countries, as we do, but they don’t want them to happen here.
You're not supposed to blow up federal buildings here. That’s something
we do, not something that’s done to us. Sure, they don’t like that. But
as for subtext, they don’t like the fact that paramilitaries are out of
control, that’s for sure. There have been fifty years of propaganda
stimulating anti-government feeling. Here’s where I again don’t care so
much about Rush Limbaugh as I do about the mainstream. There have
been fifty years of propaganda which suppresses the fact that the
government reflects powerful, private interests, and they’re the real
source of power.

So take the angry white males who are maybe joining what they
mistakenly call militias, paramilitary forces. These people are angry.
Most of them are high school graduates. They’re people whose incomes
have dropped maybe 20% over the last fifteen years or so. They can no
longer do what they think is the right thing for them to do, provide for
their families. Maybe their wives have to go out and work. And maybe
make more money than they do. Maybe the kids are running crazy
because nobody’s paying attention to them. Their lives are falling apart.
They’re angry. Who are they supposed to blame? You’re not supposed to
blame the Fortune 500, because they’re invisible. They have been
taught for fifty years now by intense propaganda, everything from the

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entertainment media to school books, that all there is around is the
government. If there’s anything going wrong, it’s the government’s fault.
The government is somehow something that’s independent of external
powers. So if your life is falling apart, blame the government.

There are plenty of things wrong with the government. But what’s
harmful to people about the government is that it’s a reflection of
something else. And that other thing you don’t see. Why don’t you see
that other thing? Because it’s been made invisible. So when you read
Clinton campaign propaganda you’ve got workers and their firms but not
owners and investors. That’s just the end result of fifty years of this stuff.
Talking about your subtext, if people are angry and frightened, they will
naturally turn to what they see. And what they’ve been taught to see is
the government.

There’s a reason why attention is focused on the government as the
source of problems. It has a defect. It’s potentially democratic. Private
corporations are not potentially democratic. The propaganda system
does not want to get people to think, The government is something we
can take over and we can use as our instrument of public power. They
don’t want people to think that. And since you can’t think that, you get
what’s called populism, but is not populism at all. It’s not the kind of
populism that says, Fine, let’s take over the government and use it as an
instrument to undermine and destroy private power, which has no right
to exist. Nobody is saying that. All that you’re hearing is that there’s
something bad about government, so let’s blow up the federal building.

DB / think the most interesting commentary on Oklahoma City was
actually on CNN on April 25. They were interviewing Stanley
Bedlington, who was identified as an ex-CIA counterterrorism
specialist. He said, right after the bombing, that there was a potential
for more violence. Why? Bedlington said, Because of "the deteriorating

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economic situation in rural America. ” I was stunned to hear that.

It’s not just rural America. These people that he’s talking about
happen to come from rural America. And it’s true that out in rural
America, where there are fewer controls, you may tend to get
paramilitaries forming more than in the slums. But the problems are in
New York City and in Boston and right throughout the whole
mainstream of the country. The problems simply reflect very objective
facts. Real wages have in fact been declining for fifteen years and profits
are zooming. The country is splitting in a noticeably Third World pattern.
There’s a big superfluous population that nobody knows what to do
with. So they toss them in jail. They want to make people afraid of
them, so they’re building up fear of crime and craziness about welfare.
That’s a real problem. Maybe in the rural counties is where they’re going
to form paramilitary groups, but this is going to be everywhere. He’s
right. It’s a very big problem. It’s a problem they face in every Third
World country. That’s why they have death squads and security forces.
They have to face that problem of all those people they are just crushing
under foot.

DB Let’s talk a little bit about conspiracy theories , because they’re
quite prevalent. In a curious way, your work and Holly Sklar’s book on
trilateralism are cited as evidence of conspiracy, somehow integrated
with Freemasons and the Bilderbergers who all meet in the Bohemian
Grove and the like. But it seems that if rhetoric is anti-regime, then
there’s just a suspension of critical inquiry. There’s no insistence on
evidence. Opinion is cited as proof. Then the chief arbiter or verifier is
radio. “I heard it on the radio, therefore it’s true. ”

You’re right. It’s like that. I can see when I talk on right-wing radio

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that there’s some degree of resonance of a kind to what I’m saying that I
don’t like. Bilderberg I’ve never mentioned. Bohemian Grove I don’t care
about. The Trilateral Commission I’ve mentioned a few times. I read
their stuff all the time. It’s so boring it’s not worth looking at.

DB But you talk about the de facto world government. That’s what
they talk about.

I didn’t talk about the de facto world government. I quoted it from the
Financial Times. I said, the Financial Times, the world’s leading
business journal, is noticing that there is a de facto world government
not of Freemasons, but of transnational corporations and institutions
that they are spawning. So take a look at real centralized power,
transnational corporations, who own most of the world. The Fortune
500 now has 63% of U.S. gross domestic product, and the trans-
nationals have a huge proportion of world trade and investment in their
hands. They are spawning a set of quasi-governmental institutions. The
Financial Times lists them: the World Bank, the IMF, then it was the
GATT Council, now it’s the World Trade Organization. Sure, that’s their
picture, and it’s a pretty accurate one. But that’s not a conspiracy, any
more than corporate boardrooms are a conspiracy.

DB The left has certainly not been free from this. The Christie
Institute theories about secret teams running around, and the
numerous JFK assassination theories. I wonder what the left has to
offer people like Timothy McVeigh and Mark Koernke. They are
certainly not listening to Alternative Radio and not reading your books.
How can we reach them?

I think the left has to reach them by doing what the left failed to do

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the other night at the meeting we went to, when Decatur workers were
coming here and asking for solidarity and support. That’s where the left
ought to be. I don’t know Timothy McVeigh, but I think the left ought to
be out there getting those guys to join unions and form grassroots
organizations and take over their local governments. If the left can’t do
that, it doesn’t deserve to exist.

DB Just to explain , there was a Jobs with Justice meeting at MIT on
May 9 . Striking and locked-out workers from Decatur (there are three
actions going on there) were there to bring this to the attention of
people. There were only about 75 people in the hall. It was kind of
distressing. In the same hall, in the last couple of months, when you
gave talks on East Timor and Colombia and the drug war there were
very large turnouts. What do you attribute the low attendance to?

It could be technical things, like maybe there wasn’t good publicity. I
should say that this is the first talk that I’ve given in that big hall for
probably twenty years which hasn’t been virtually overflowing. This is
also the first talk that happened to involve solidarity with working
people. I doubt that that’s a pure accident. I think that tells you
something about where the left isn’t and where it ought to be. There was
one other meeting that was less well attended than I expected. It was on
the Contract with America, which again involved welfare mothers and
poor people.

DB It's kind of hard to predict what’s going to happen. There’s that
Yeats poem “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . What rough beast . . .
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” But in terms of Oklahoma
City and now the call for a draconian increase in FBI powers of

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surveillance, infiltration, and the like, what do you think is coming up?

Before Oklahoma City, Congress had already rescinded the Fourth
Amendment, the elimination of the exclusionary law, allowing basically
illegal search. That was prior to Oklahoma City. So Oklahoma City may
somewhat extend FBI powers. I don’t think it’s going to have a big
effect. I think the things that are happening lie elsewhere. The so-called
conservatives want a powerful, violent state, and they want it to have a
powerful security system. So during the 1980s, the U.S. prison
population more than tripled. It’s going up more. Under Clinton’s crime
bill it’s going to go way up. The U.S. is virtually the only country—
maybe Iraq, Iran, a few others — to let children be killed by the state, to
have the death penalty for minors. The U.S. rarely signs international
human rights conventions. We have a rotten record on that. But we just
signed the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. We’re the
177th country to sign it, which shows you how that goes. One of the
provisions of that says that minors, meaning people under 19, cannot
receive life imprisonment or the death penalty. We’ve got juveniles
sitting on death row, so we’re in straight violation of what we just
signed. We’re one of the very few countries that does that. This attack
on the judicial system and the system of rights has nothing to do with
Oklahoma City. It has to do with creating a much more punitive society
which will deal somehow with the fact that an awful lot of people are
useless for the one human value that still matters, namely, making
profits. That’s way more important than whatever further rights the FBI
may get as a result of Oklahoma City, in my opinion. These things are
bad, like Rush Limbaugh is bad. But there are much more central things
that are happening.

DB Earlier I said you had compared the current situation with

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Germany and Iran. What are your views on arguing by analogy? A lot of
people all over the country were quick to bring up the Weimar
Republic and even the Reichstag fire. Do you think that’s a good way to
understand things, to talk about analogies?

Analogies can be helpful. You don’t want to push them too hard. It’s
worth noticing that the kinds of circumstances that we see are not
without historical precedent. It’s not like they’re coming from Mars. So
there have been situations that are not identical. You can look crucially
at the differences. But you can learn something from looking at history.

DB What about the political uses of Islam and Muslims and Arabs
in terms of what happened right after the Oklahoma City bombing?

Take my “friend" A.M. Rosenthal. I’m surprised the Times is willing
to let him loose. He gives you such an insight into how that newspaper
was running for years when he was in charge of it. He writes a regular
column. The day after Oklahoma City he had a column basically saying,
This just shows that we’re not dealing properly with Middle East
terrorism. Let’s bomb them all over the place. He said, We don’t know
yet who did it, but let’s bomb the Middle East anyway. Not in those
words, that was the message, to borrow your term, the “subtext." It
wasn’t very “sub," either. A couple of days later it turned out it was
right-wing paramilitaries here. He wrote another column saying, This
really shows that we’re not dealing with terrorism from the Middle East
properly, so let’s be serious about it and deal with Middle East terrorism.
They mean a very special kind of Middle East terrorism. They don’t
mean the kind, for example, when Israeli planes bomb villages in
Lebanon and murder people. That’s not terrorism they’re talking about.

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DB Or the 1985 CIA bombing.

They’re not talking about the CIA bombing in Beirut, which is the one
really close analog to Oklahoma City. The discipline of the media in
“forgetting” the 1985 Beirut car bombing, the worst in history, specially
targeting civilians, was pretty impressive, particularly with all the
laments about how middle America was coming to look like Beirut and
the hysterical threats to bomb anyone thought to be responsible — for
Oklahoma City, not Beirut. The analogy was repeatedly brought to the
attention of the press. That I know just from personal experience. But
ears mysteriously closed. For those interested, I wrote about it in a book
edited by Alex George called Western State Terrorism, a book
unmentionable and unreviewable in the U.S., as one could predict from
the title.

But they were nor talking about the Beirut bombing that was virtually
duplicated in Oklahoma City. Not even contemporary ones. Israel
regularly bombs civilian targets in Lebanon. They don’t pay attention to
it. Occasionally you get a mention in the paper. Israel had Lebanon
under blockade for a month. They wouldn’t let fishermen out.
Blockading a country is an act of aggression. In fact, Israel has a
permanent blockade on Lebanon, from Tyre to the south. But nobody
talks about that. It's all in violation of unanimous U.N. Security Council
resolutions which now are almost twenty years old that the U.S. signed.
That’s not terrorism. In fact, they’re not even talking about Turkey. First
of all invading Iraq, but in its own southeast corner it’s been carrying out
murderous terrorism for years. It’s getting worse and worse. They are not
even talking about the actual terrorism that they’re worried about.

Take Pan Am 103. Take a look at Iran. Iran is now supposed to be
the center of international terrorism. Any time any act takes place, it’s
Iran. You don’t even wait for evidence. With one extremely interesting

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exception: Pan Am 103 is not blamed on Iran. Why is that? How come
that one example is not blamed on Iran? That’s the one example which
very likely Iran is involved in. So how come the one where Iran is most
likely involved is not blamed on it? It’s blamed on Libya, on very shaky
grounds. I don’t think it takes very long to figure that one out. It’s very
likely that the bombing of Pan Am 103 was a retaliatory bombing for
the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus by the American naval vessel
USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf, which was a straight act of murder.
There have already been several articles in the U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings. The most recent one was by a retired Marine lieutenant
colonel describing in detail what happened there. The commander of the
Vincennes got the Legion of Merit for it. The ship just focused its high-
tech weaponry on a commercial airliner, knowing it was a commercial
airliner, right in commercial air space, and shot it down, killing 290
people. That was part of the U.S. tilt towards its friend Saddam Hussein
during the Iraq-lran war. That’s not the kind of story that you want all
over the front pages, so for that one act, Pan Am 103, Iran is not
responsible, probably the one for which it is responsible.

So the concern over Middle East terrorism is highly selective in all
sorts of ways, just like the concern over Islamic fundamentalism. The
most fundamentalist state in the world is Saudi Arabia. I don’t see a lot
about that. Why? They do the job. They make sure the profits from oil
come to the U.S., so they can be as fundamentalist as they like. This is
the most shoddy and shallow propaganda. It’s amazing they can get
away with it.

DB I've always wondered where you got access to the U.S. Naval
Institute Proceedings. Is that sent to you? Do you subscribe to it?

I look for it. I must have seen a reference somewhere and then went

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and looked. This story actually even finally made the mainstream press.
Newsweek had a cover story on it two or three years ago. The first thing
that I saw was something in the LA. Times. The commander of the
vessel next to the Vincennes, David Carlson, had an op-ed where he
said, We were standing and watching in amazement. It happened to
mention that he had an article in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings,
so I looked it up. Then I started keeping my eyes on it and found this
much more recent one on the Navy cover-up. This article goes through
the cover-up. It even ends up quoting some high Army officer saying,
The U.S. Navy shouldn’t be allowed out on the high seas, they’re too
dangerous. That’s not the kind of stuff you really want all over the place.
It’s kind of amazing that with all of the talk about Iran, right now we’re
embargoing Iran because they’re involved in terrorism. It’s a rogue state.
Everybody’s wild about Pan Am 103, and somehow you can’t notice
that that’s the one thing that’s not attributed to them and which they
probably did.

Also quite interesting is the fact that the U.S. has charged several
Libyans, but is making sure they don’t go to trial. Libya has offered to
have them tried in a neutral venue, like the Hague, but the U.S. and
U.K. refuse — meaning they don’t want them tried unless they can
control the trial. The British committee of families of the victims has
been militantly critical of this refusal. The U.S. committee just goes
along with Washington propaganda, as does the U.S. press. A
documentary about all this was played in the British Parliament and on
BBC TV. Here, PBS refused to run it, and commercial TV isn’t worth
approaching. Try to find something about any of this in the media.

DB You mentioned A.M. Rosenthal and his biases at the Times. But
you don’t have to go that far. Right here in Boston you have a talk show
host, Howie Carr, who said that the Oklahoma City bombing was done

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by “a bunch of towelheads.” There was a little story, though, in
Oklahoma City involving an Iraqi woman, a refugee. Did you hear about
that?

I don’t recall.

DB Christopher Hitchens wrote about it in The Nation. It's one of
the very few references I’ve seen. Saher Al-Saidi was seven months
pregnant. Her house was attacked by a mob of rednecks screaming
insults about Islam and Muslims. Windows were broken. She ran from
room to room in fear and suffered a miscarriage.

But that’s not from Howie Carr. That’s from years and years of
perfectly mainstream publications presenting an image of Arab terrorists,
Islamic fundamentalist crazies either attacking Israel or attacking us.
The U.S. is in a state of national emergency now. President Clinton has
declared a state of national emergency, because of the grave threat to
our national security and national interest posed by Hezbollah in
Lebanon and Hamas in the occupied territories. That’s not Howie Carr.

DB To continue with the political uses of Islam, Willy Claes, the
NATO Secretary General in Brussels, in February said, “Islamic
fundamentalism is just as dangerous as communism.

Is he referring to Saudi Arabia? No. It’s just like liberation theology.
Anything that’s out of control is dangerous. If there’s some brand of
Islamic fundamentalism that’s out of control, that’s dangerous. If there’s
some brand of the Catholic church that’s out of control, that’s
dangerous. If it’s a democratic politician in Guatemala who's out of
control, that’s dangerous. If you’re out of control you’re dangerous.

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Islamic fundamentalism is one of the ways in which a very repressed
part of the world is beginning to organize itself independently. So
naturally that’s unacceptable. And it’s not Islamic fundamentalism. You
can tell that right off. The leading Islamic fundamentalist state is Saudi
Arabia. Let’s go away from states. Take non-state actors. Who are the
most extreme Islamic fundamentalists in the world? The ones who the
U.S. supported in Afghanistan for ten years. They would beat anybody.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. You can’t get beyond that. He makes Saudi
Arabia look mild. He got $6 billion of aid from the U.S. and Saudi
Arabia. Right now he has been tearing the country apart. This isn’t Pol
Pot. You don’t get any points for talking about the atrocities after the
Americans pulled out. Here the Russians pulled out, and as soon as the
Russians pulled out they started destroying the place. But it’s our guys
destroying it. So therefore you have to look pretty hard to find it. Kabul
has been wrecked. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people have
been killed. Maybe hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Mostly guys like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, our man, bombarding the
place. Afghanistan has become one of the major centers of drug
production. Our guys, they are fanatic Islamic fundamentalists, but we
certainly weren’t worrying about them when we were pouring money
into their pockets.

DB And that CIA operation in Afghanistan has spilled over into
Pakistan, where there’s severe drug addiction. You’ve written about
this. Benazir Bhutto is now asking the U.S. to help with Pakistan’s
terrorist problem.

One thing I would mention is that when it’s a CIA operation, that
means it’s a White House operation. It’s not CIA. They don’t do things
on their own.

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DB That’s a point you made about the recent disclosures about
Guatemala.

Let’s be serious about it. Maybe you’ll find a rogue operation now and
then, but as far as I’m aware, overwhelmingly the CIA does what it’s told
by the White House. So its role is to provide plausible denial for the
White House, and people shouldn’t fall for that game. If it’s a CIA

operation it’s because they were ordered to do it. They’re only part of the

operation.

DB I’ve got a flight in less than an hour. My mind is going to the

airport, so I’m not all here, but let’s just continue this for a few

minutes longer. I want to ask you about the selective use of memory. I
remember my mother telling me about her village in Turkish Armenia.
It was paradise. I never heard a negative thing said about anything.
Everyone was living in a sort of Edenesque country there. But thinking
about you in the 1940s in Philadelphia with your family, what kind of
information were you getting about what the Nazis were up to in
Europe? Did you have a sense of what was unfolding there ?

You mean in the 1930s?

DB Not just in the 1930s, but the genocide.

Everybody knew more or less what was going on. By 1943 at the
latest it was pretty well known what was happening, and there was at
least the beginning of a public outcry. Even before the war, the sense of
growing terror was palpable in my parents’ circles. But take the 1930s,
speaking of memories. The other night in the meeting on Decatur they

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showed a video on police violence. I remember that very well from
1934-1935, with much worse scenes of police attacking. I remember I
was with my mother on a trolley car. I must have been five years old.
There was a textile strike. Women workers were picketing. We just
passed by and saw a very violent police attack on women strikers,
picketers outside, much worse than what we saw the other night in the
video on Decatur, which was bad enough. So idyllic memories of
childhood, I think one has to ask some questions about. In the 1930s it
was pretty clear that the Nazis were a very ominous and dangerous force
that was like a dark cloud over everything throughout my whole
childhood. By the early 1940s, around the middle of the war, it was
pretty obvious, maybe you didn’t know the details about Auschwitz, but
the general picture was pretty clear.

DB You were reading voraciously in those days. I think there’s a
comment in the film Manufacturing Consent where you used to check
out ten, twelve, fourteen books at a time from the library.

Remember, in those days there were good library systems. That was
one of the reasons you could survive the Depression. But I spent a lot of
time at the downtown Philadelphia public library. It was the big public
library that had everything. You couldn’t check books out from there
because they didn’t allow it. But I was reading plenty of stuff, a lot of
odd dissident journals, some of them crackpot, some of them
interesting. All sorts of material.

DB Again, bringing it to today, you encourage people to be
skeptical. You often end a talk, Don’t believe anything i say. Go and
find out for yourself. When does that skepticism, which I suggest is
happening with some of these paramilitaries, switch into paranoia?

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Skepticism can lead to paranoia, but it certainly doesn’t have to. Any
good scientist is skeptical all the time. Every time a professional journal
comes in, the students read it with skepticism, if they’re any good, at
least, because they know you’ve got to question and evaluate. But when
you read a technical journal with skepticism, that doesn’t mean you
assume it’s being prepared by the Bilderberg conference to undermine
your mind. That’s quite a gap. The difference is that skepticism against
a background of understanding and rationality is a very healthy attitude.
Skepticism against a vacuum is extremely dangerous. The educational
system and the doctrinal system have created vacuums. People’s minds
are empty and confused because everything’s been driven out of them.
In that case skepticism can quickly turn into paranoia.

DB But there is a drumbeat of propaganda constantly going on. You
sort of dismissed Limbaugh and what he represents, but he reaches
twenty million listeners. We don’t have that kind of audience.

We don’t, but commercial television and Hollywood have a much
bigger audience. I’m not dismissing Limbaugh. I’m saying that that’s a
peripheral phenomenon. Let’s take the kind of things, when I was a
young adult, I was seeing in the movies, like On the Waterfront, a big,
famous movie. That was typical of a genre. Tens of millions of dollars
were put into making films like that, all of them with the same message.
The message is, Unions are the enemy of the working man. The theme
of that movie is Marlon Brando, upstanding, courageous young guy,
throws union boss into the ocean and stands up for his rights. That was
the key picture of very self-conscious propaganda running through the
entertainment industry, the schools, the newspapers, everything else,
saying, We are on one side, “we” being the working folks, like the guy

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who happens to sit in the executive office and the guy on the assembly
line, we’re all on one side. Then there are the really bad guys trying to
destroy our lives, namely, the outsiders, the unions. We’ve got to defend
ourselves from them. That has worked. That has led to the present
situation.

Take a look at popular attitudes. I think about 80% of the population
think that working people don’t have enough influence. A substantial
number think that unions have too much influence. After NAFTA, the
opinions were opposed to NAFTA on the same grounds that the labor
unions opposed it, but they were opposed to the labor unions for having
involved themselves in that dispute, namely, in advocating the positions
that most of the population supported. That wasn’t Rush Limbaugh.
That’s the result of decades — it goes back to the nineteenth century, but
I mean in the modern period — of very intensive propaganda designed to
make people lose the sense of solidarity and sympathy and mutual
support and help for one another and democratization that unions stand
for. When you wipe that degree of understanding and sympathy and
support out of people’s heads, then you go right to paranoia. It’s that
kind of thing that a demagogue like Limbaugh can exploit, but I think we
should recognize where the problem lies. Not there. Much deeper. Fie
wouldn’t get anywhere if he didn’t have this basis prepared for it.

DB I'm not going to say “subtext, " but another theme, I wonder if
you’re aware of this. The director of On the Waterfront was Elia Kazan.
He sang to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Marlon
Brando plays a character who is encouraged to and is justified in
cooperating with the authorities.

Elia Kazan was one of the people who was subjected to the
McCarthyite routine, and yes, he sang to the House Un-American

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Activities Committee. I don’t have any comment on that. You don’t
blame people for not being heroes, for just being ordinary people. So I
think he could have been more courageous than that, like, say, Lillian
Heilman, but that’s easy for me to say. So, yes, he did. And it’s true
that’s what happened. But that was just the most successful of a genre.
It was kind of interesting. I think that movie came out the same year as
Salt of the Earth, which is a very serious, low-budget but excellently
done film. It’s a thousand times as good as On the Waterfront from any
esthetic or other criteria, except it happened to be pro-union. It showed
in a few small theaters around. That’s not the message that the multi-
billion dollar entertainment industry was being organized to put across at
that time. That’s a dramatic contrast, and it’s by no means the only one.
That’s just typical of decades of propaganda.

DB What do you have coming up In terms of trips and books? I
know you have a new linguistics book that MIT is putting out. Any
political books coming out?

I hope so. I promised a couple, anyway. I was in Australia for a week
and I promised them that I would write up the talks and they’ll publish it
and maybe somebody will here. It's on a lot of different things. Then I
also promised South End that I would try to write up and expand this
series of articles on “Rollback" that’s been running in Z magazine.

DB How about your book on the Middle east, Fateful Triangle?
You’ve been talking about revising that as well.

There have been many requests to update and revise it. Actually, the
third chapter of the book of mine that just came out (World Orders Old
and New), about a third of that book is kind of an updating. But I might

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want to do that. There’s a lot to say about the region.

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The Federal Reserve Board

May 31, 1995

DB Wednesday is usually, I forget, is it your golf or tennis day?

Both, [laughs]

DB / hate to remind you of things, Noam, but 1995 marks your
fortieth year at MIT.

That’s right, just finishing it

DB How did you get that job?

When I got out of four years at Harvard and the Society of Fellows, I
had basically no formal profession, no credentials in any formal
academic field, and had no particular commitment to the academic
world. I wasn’t at all sure I was going to even try to continue. But I had
some friends at MIT. Morris Halle, you know him?

DB Of course, he has an office right across the hall from yours.

We had been friends already for years as graduate students. He was
here, doing part-time research and part-time teaching. There was a

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project at the Research Lab of Electronics on machine translation which
had an interest in linguists. So he and Roman Jakobson helped a bit. I
met with the director of the laboratory. We talked a little bit about it. I
said I would be happy to come but I wouldn’t work on that project,
which I didn’t think had any interest for me, but I would be glad to come
to do the kind of work that I was interested in and to do some teaching
and so on. They thought that was fine. So I came and did the work I
was interested in at the Research Lab of Electronics, the same place
where I am now, this old Second World War wooden building. I started
doing a little teaching on the side.

Within about five years Morris and I had managed to arrange some
things. People began being interested from outside. Visitors came. We
pretty soon had a doctoral candidate who we had to put through the
electrical engineering department because we didn’t have any
department at the time. In 1960, I guess, we managed to start the
official department.

DB You Ve commented to me that when you joined MIT at around
that time there was a group of you that were politically active and
committed.

Not at that time. At that time it was basically unknown. In fact, I
wouldn’t swear to this, but I think that I was the first person at the
laboratory who refused to be cleared. It was a military-financed
laboratory, and people routinely went through security clearance
procedures. I just refused. I know everyone thought it was kind of weird,
because the only effect of it was that I missed out on free trips on
military air transport and things like that. It was considered strange
enough that I suspect that I must have been the first person ever to do
that. I didn’t know any politically active people here at all.

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DB So that came later, people like Wayne O’Neil and others.

That’s ten years later.

DB Did you feel that you had any allies internally?

Internally? Political allies? No, not really. I didn’t expect to. My
political life was somewhere else. I should say that within a few years I
did meet people on the faculty who themselves had pretty similar
interests and backgrounds to mine, some older people, for example
Salvador Luria, a Nobel-Prize-winning biologist. I’ve forgotten whether
he was here when I came. He was certainly here within a few years. He
was older. But we shared plenty of interests. We must have met in the
early 1960s. And there were other people. My friend Louis Kampf, and
quite a few others. By the early 1960s people were kind of getting
together.

DB That research you were doing in the 1950s and 1960s, was any
of it federally funded?

Oh, yeah. Not only was it federally funded, it was militarily funded. In
fact, whether anything is military-funded or not is pretty much a
bookkeeping exercise. MIT runs primarily on soft money, not on
endowments, not on tuition. How the soft money is distributed is a very
mysterious matter which they don’t even understand in the bookkeeping
department, as I know, having once been on a committee that tried to
look into it years later. In a certain sense, everything is military-funded,
even the music department. The sense in which that’s true is that if they
didn’t have military funding for, say, the electrical engineering

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department and had to go to other funds for that, that would cut off the
departments like the music department. So it is primarily a bookkeeping
matter. But if you look at books of mine that were written in the early
1960s, you’ll notice a formal statement on the front page saying, This
was funded with the support of, and then it lists the three services. The
reason is that the laboratory itself is funded by the three services, or
was, maybe still is, for all I know.

DB How has the institution changed over the time that you have
been there?

The big change was to a certain extent a result of the changes in
science and math education in the country that took place around
1960. To some extent it was sparked by Sputnik, or at least that was
used as the pretext for it. That created a great concern in Congress and
around the country that somehow we were falling behind the Russians.
That initiated and maybe was exploited for (you can argue about this) a
lot of involvement in science education and math education in the
schools. Within a short period of time students were coming to MIT who
were much better trained. MIT started to shift at that time, more or less
as a reflection of the students who were coming in, from an engineering
school, which it had been in the 1950s — when I got here it was
primarily an engineering school — to a science-math school, which it was
by the mid-1960s. So many more students were majoring in the core
sciences and mathematics. The classical engineering disciplines started
to decline, people who were figuring out how to build bridges and things
like that. Students were much less interested in that. The engineering
departments that remained generally duplicated science curricula. So
like in the electrical engineering department you wouldn’t be studying
how to put circuits together, but you would be studying physics and

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mathematics not unlike what you would be studying in the physics and
math departments, except with applications to electrical engineering
problems. The same is true of aeronautical engineering and mechanical
engineering and so on. It became a science-based university instead of
an engineering-based one.

One consequence of this was a considerable growth in the
humanities. The engineers of the 1950s were pretty vocationally
oriented. For them the humanities were kind of a frill. It was something
you took so that you could know how to talk to people politely. But by
the 1960s, the science and math students, for one thing, had more
time. They weren’t totally occupied with applications, and they just had
other interests. That led to student pressure to expand the humanities
programs. I was personally interested in that myself, especially with
philosophy, so I was particularly involved in trying to develop the
philosophy program from being kind of like a prep school, read-some-
interesting-books type of program, to a real philosophy program, both
undergraduate and graduate.

The same happened in history. At about that time, other departments
were spinning off. The biology and psychology and brain sciences
departments all spun off at that time, actually from the very same
electronics laboratory. The electronics laboratory where I was was a
place where there was a very strange and complicated mixture of people
interested in all sorts of offbeat topics, which later became departments,
some of them huge, at the Institute. Biology and psychology and
linguistics and philosophy and the computer sciences all came out of
that milieu. But by the mid-1960s it was a very different sort of place,
like a university based on science rather than a high-quality engineering
school. You could see the shift in the nature of the students, the
curricula, etc.

It was still very apolitical, in a sense. I should say that the faculty

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peace activities in this area, signing ads, organizing protests, were
mostly based at MIT, not at Harvard, from the early 1960s. So even
though overall the Institute has a more conservative cast than, say,
Harvard, it’s here that the political activists mostly work. A few people
drifted in on the periphery from Harvard, Howard Zinn from Boston
University, but it was mainly MIT, even though it’s a very small group of
faculty. Among the students, there was a small group, people like Mike
Albert and Steve Shalom and others, who were students around the
mid-1960s. They were very active starting around 1965, 1966.

Also Louis Kampf and I were teaching at the time very large under-
graduate courses with hundreds of students on contemporary affairs and
social and political issues, the role of intellectuals, alternative vocations,
things like that. They were bringing in lots of students as the ferment of
the 1960s finally hit MIT. But it really wasn’t until late 1968 or early
1969 that the Institute became really seriously politicized and became
seriously involved in things like the antiwar movement and so on.

DB You often give talks at MIT. Just in the last few months you’ve
given talks on Colombia and the drug war, East Timor, and most
recently in solidarity with the workers in Decatur, Illinois.

This role of MIT as the central place for community and university-
based activism has continued. So if an organization wants to have a
meeting, they’re much more likely to have it here than at Harvard or
Boston University. Much more likely. That’s why we always have these
meetings where you show up at the same room, 26-100.

DB The new CIA director is John Deutch. He’s a former MIT provost.
Did you know him?

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Not terribly well, but we knew each other.

DB The reason I’m asking is that I figure when you retire from MIT
you’ll have a new career at Langley (CIA headquarters).

I don’t think so [chuckles]. We were actually friends and got along
fine, although we disagreed on about as many things as two human
beings can disagree about. I liked him. We got along very well together.
He’s very honest, very direct. You know where you stand with him. We
talked to each other. When we had disagreements, they were open,
sharp, clear, honestly dealt with. I found it fine. I had no problem with
him. I was one of the very few people on the faculty, I’m told, who was
supporting his candidacy for the President of MIT.

DB Which he didn’t get, right?

There was faculty opposition.

DB One of the questions you are often asked after your talks is the
one about, How can you work at MIT? You’ve never had any
interference with your work, have you?

Quite the contrary. MIT has been very supportive. In the 1960s,
particularly, I’m sure I was giving them plenty of trouble. I don’t know
the figures now, but in 1969, when the only serious faculty/student
inquiry into this was undertaken, into funding, there was a commission
set up at the time of local ferment about military labs, and I was on it,
and at that time MIT funding was almost entirely the Pentagon. About
half the Institute’s budget was coming from two major military
laboratories that they administered, and of the rest, the academic side,

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it could have been something like 90% or so from the Pentagon.
Something like that. Very high. So it was a Pentagon-based university.
And I was at a military-funded lab.

But I never had the slightest interference with anything I did. MIT
had quite a good record on protecting academic freedom. I’m sure that
they were under pressure, maybe not from the government, but certainly
from alumni, I would imagine. I was very visible at the time in
organizing protests and resistance. You know the record. It was very
visible and pretty outspoken and far out. But we had no problems from
them, nor did anyone, as far as I know, draft resisters, etc.

DB That always surprises people when you tell them that.

It shouldn’t. It just shows that they don’t understand how things
work. A science-based university like this is much freer in those
respects.

DB Let’s talk about some economic issues. I want to start with the
Federal Reserve. What is its role?

The Federal Reserve basically controls things like interest rates. It’s
had various commitments or directives over the years. Originally its
official goals, at least, were to keep inflation down and employment up.
So one of its goals was to help achieve the goal of effectively full
employment. That never means a hundred percent, but something
approaching it. That goal has receded into the distance. Now its primary
commitment is to preventing inflation. That’s a reflection of things that
have happened in international financial markets. So the amount of
unregulated financial capital in the world has exploded astronomically in
the last twenty-five years. It moves around very fast, thanks to

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telecommunications and so on. So there may be, let’s say, a trillion
dollars a day moving around financial markets. It’s mostly speculating
against currencies. It moves to places where it looks as though
currencies are going to be stable with high unemployment and low
economic growth, so that there are unlikely to be inflationary pressures.
The Federal Reserve has been basically anti-inflation. If you are
investing, say, in bonds, your biggest enemy is potential inflation, which
means potential growth. Therefore you want to move away from places
which are going to be stimulating the economy. The Federal Reserve
interest rates will tend to go up to prevent stimulation of the economy
and the possibility of inflation — the two tend to go together. So they’ve
had a dampening effect on economic growth, also on jobs. They want
unemployment to go up, basically. So unemployment goes up, the labor
costs go down. There’s less pressure for wage increases. So the
commitment to full employment, which was originally at least part of
their formal commitment, has disappeared.

DB There’s an interesting comment that Paul Volcker made in
1979. He was the head of the Fed then. He said the living standard of
the average American has to decline. That’s one policy that has
certainly produced results.

But it’s not just the Fed. This is part of general processes going on in
the domestic and international economy and also very specific social
policies. You don’t have to react to them this way. For example, there
are ways to slow down the movement of financial capital and to protect
currencies and to maintain stimulative policies by government. There are
ways to do that, and those ways have been known for a long time.
They’re not undertaken because of a commitment to certain social
policies. Those social policies are basically to roll back the welfare state.

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There’s a pretty good article on this, if you’re interested, in the current
issue of Challenge magazine, a good journal of economics, written by a
very fine international economist, David Felix. It’s on what’s called the
Tobin tax. This is a proposal made by James Tobin back in 1978, a
Nobel Prize-winning economist at Yale. This was a well-known talk he
gave. He was then President of the American Economic Association.
This was his presidential address. This was the early stages of the
process, but he pointed out that the flow of financial capital and the
increase of it is going to have the effect of driving down growth rates and
wages and it will also have a further effect of increasing inequality,
concentrating wealth in narrower sectors of the population. He
suggested at the time a tax, which would have to be international, which
would penalize movement of financial funds just for speculation against
currency. That’s called the Tobin tax. It’s been kicking around the UN for
some years, but it’s never been implemented. David Felix’s point in this
article is that, nobody knows for sure, but it could very well work, it
could very well shift capital from economically useless speculative
purposes, in fact, economically destructive speculative purposes, to
more productive investment. It could very well have that effect. But even
the sectors of private capital that would benefit from it have not
supported it. He argues that the reason is that they have an overriding
class interest, which overcomes their narrow profit interest. The
overriding class interest is to use the fiscal crisis of states to undermine
the social contract that’s been built up — to roll back the gains in welfare,
union rights, labor rights, and so on. That interest is sufficient that they
are willing to see this instrument used to cut back growth in investment,
even the sectors that would benefit from it. It is a pretty plausible
argument, I think. And the Federal Reserve is just a piece of it.

DB The Fed is kind of the de facto central bank of the U.S. But it's

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private, right?

No, it’s not private. It’s independent of specific government orders.
The President can’t order it to do something. But its members and
director are appointed through the government.

DB So they’re presidential appointments?

Yes. But then they’re essentially independent.

DB It seems that the Fed and other central banks can’t seem to
stabilize and control currency rates as they once could.

That’s gone because the system was dismantled. There was a system
up until the early 1970s.

DB Bretton Woods.

Yes.

DB But there was this recent precipitous drop of the dollar against
the yen and the mark , for example. The banks tried to stabilize the
dollar . . .

It’s not clear that they tried. Maybe the European banks did. It’s not
at all clear that the American government did, or its banks. It’s just not
at all obvious that that was their goal. They may be happy to see the
dollar drop.

DB But it is your contention that traders and speculators command

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more capital today than the central banks?

I don’t think it’s my contention. It’s everybody’s contention.

DB David Peterson alerted me to a passage in John Maynard
Keynes’s classic work from the mid- 1930s, The General Theory of
Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes says.- “/4s the organization of
investment markets improves, the risk of the predominance of
speculation does, however, increase. Speculators may do no harm as
bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise, but the position is serious
when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.”

That’s happened. That’s why the Bretton Woods system, which
Keynes was instrumental in helping to craft, did have mechanisms for
regulation of currencies. The basic idea of the system was that the dollar
was the international currency in those days because of the over-
whelming industrial and economic power of the U.S., which was indeed
overwhelming. So the dollar was the international currency. It was fixed
relative to gold. Then other currencies were regulated relative to the
dollar. There were various devices to allow a certain degree of flexibility,
depending on economic growth, recession, and so on. That was the
fundamental system. That was dismantled unilaterally by the U.S. in the
early 1970s, when the U.S. determined that it no longer wanted to
function as basically the international banker. This had to do with a lot
of things: the growth of the more or less trilateral economic system (with
the growth of the Japanese-based system and the growth of the
German-based European system), and also the cost of the Vietnam War
and its economic benefits to rivals of the U.S. These led to these
decisions by the Nixon administration.

At the time that these decisions were made, financial speculation

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was a bubble. So estimates are that about ten percent of the capital in
international exchanges at the time was for speculation and about ninety
percent was related to the real economy, for investment and trade. By
the 1990 those figures were reversed. It was about ninety percent
speculation and ten percent investment and trade. David Felix did a
recent study done for UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade
and Development, in which he cites estimates that by 1994 it was
about ninety-five percent speculative and about five percent real
economy-related. So that’s pretty much what Keynes was worried about.

DB To continue with Keynes, he said, “When the capital
development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a
casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. ”

By the 1980s, the international economy was being called a “casino
economy.” There is a book with that title by a well-known British
international economist, Susan Strange, The Casino Economy. And
others were using the same phrase. It becomes in thrall to speculation.
It’s this that James Tobin was warning about in 1978, when the whole
process was still in its early stages.

DB Do you think the current economic system can continue in this
cycle of ups and downs, or is it prone to collapse? Have they built in
enough safeguards to protect themselves from another 1929?

Nobody has the slightest idea. In the early 1980s, when the debt
crisis hit, the banks were worried that they wouldn’t be able to contain
it. They were bailed out by the public. The huge Third World debt,
which had been developed very fast, became a major problem when
U.S. interest rates shot up, since a lot of the debt is keyed to the dollar.

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As interest rates shot up, for one thing, a ton of money began flowing
out of places like Latin America. Not East Asia, because East Asia has
capital controls. So rich Koreans couldn’t send their capital to the U.S.
There are controls on that. But the wealth of Latin America, which is
much more open to international markets for various historical reasons,
simply flowed to U.S. banks. This led to a complete collapse in Latin
America. In fact, the debt owed by Latin America is not all that different
from the amount of capital flight from Latin America. Also, the interest
rates on the debt went way up because they’re tied to U.S. interest
rates.

Then came this huge debt crisis. It looked like major countries,
Brazil, Mexico, and others, were going to default. The big banks were
very worried. That was finessed mainly by a taxpayer bailout. It was
picked up by the World Bank. One way or another, most of the debt was
transferred over to the public domain and the banks were bailed out.

In 1987 there was another apparent crisis. We just saw one in
December 1994. Nobody knew what the domino effect might be of the
Mexican collapse, whether it was going to start toppling other Third
World financial markets, which are also based very heavily on
speculation, just as the Mexican one was. The Clinton bailout was not
so much to pay off the people who invested through speculation in
Mexico. They had already pulled out their money or lost it. It was to
prop up export capital to countries like Argentina and so on and to
guarantee people against losses there. So it is a taxpayer bailout going to
promote relatively risk-free investment through public funds, but not so
much for the Mexican investors. This one seems to have been contained,
too. But what will happen next time I don’t think anybody knows.
Predictions on this are almost meaningless. Just take a look at what the
international economists and the World Bank were predicting about
Mexico, and that will tell you how reliable their forecasts are. Up until

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the collapse, they were just euphoric about the prospects for Mexico,
this great economic miracle. After the collapse they started explaining
how they knew it all along. But try to find it before.

DB To get back to the whole issue of employment, there was a
notion in the U.S. that full employment was a desirable policy goal.
That has changed dramatically.

There no longer is even a theoretical commitment to full employment,
as there had been from the late 1940s. There was a commitment, at
least a theoretical commitment, which was sometimes partially
implemented from the late 1940s on, but that’s gone. Now the
commitment is to something different. It’s to what’s called the “natural
rate of unemployment." There’s supposed to be some natural rate. As
unemployment goes down below some natural rate of unemployment,
then inflation is supposed to go up, and you want to make sure that
unemployment stays at the natural place. People differ on what that is,
but it’s pretty high, over six percent.

DB That’s a pretty bogus figure.

It’s not bogus. It has a certain meaning. It means that you want
wages to stay low enough so that they don’t carry the risk of potential
inflation.

DB / say bogus in that a lot of people are simply not counted.

But that’s always been true. What they call unemployment is a figure
well below the number of unemployed. That’s always true. There are
people who are off the labor market or who have given up, who are out

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of the visible economy. So these are just the numbers. That was also
true when they were aiming at three percent.

DB Even if you work one hour a week, for example, you’re
considered employed.

I wouldn’t say “bogus," because everybody knows the way it’s done.
The numbers measure something. They certainly don’t measure the
number of people who have a regular job that they want.

DB There seem to be some obvious advantages to corporate power
to have a permanent army of the unemployed.

Although we should bear in mind that by now they have an
international army of the unemployed. During the latest recession, the
Clinton recovery, this growth period of the last couple of years, there has
not been a corresponding growth in wages, even though employment
has gone up, which is what you’d expect in a normal labor market. As
the employment goes up and the reserve army of unemployed goes
down, you’d expect the pressure on wages to go up. But that hasn't
happened. Nobody knows for certain, but it’s probable that a large part
of the reason for that is that there always is the threat of simply
transferring production elsewhere. You don’t even have to implement the
threat. The fact that it’s there is enough.

There’s nothing abstract about this. Take, say, the current strikes in
Decatur, a crucial moment in labor history. Three major corporations,
only one of which is based in the U.S. (one is based in Britain and one
in Japan) are involved in trying to basically destroy some of the last
remnants of the industrial labor unions in the U.S. in this old working-
class town. One of them is a strict lockout. The other two are technically

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strikes — "were," I should say, because the United Auto Workers have
already collapsed. So there are only two still going. The others are
strikes, but they’re strikes that the corporations wanted, because they
wanted to be able to destroy the unions.

They’ve explained how they could do it. Caterpillar, the U.S. -based
one, first of all has profits coming out of its ears. It’s making huge
profits, like other major corporations, so it’s got plenty of capital. There’s
no problem that way. But furthermore, they’ve been using their profits
over the past years to build up excess capacity in other countries. For
example, they have plants in Brazil where they can get much cheaper
labor and they can keep filling their international orders. Notice that
that’s not done for reasons of economic efficiency. Quite the contrary.
It’s done for power reasons. You don’t build up excess capacity for
economic efficiency, but you do build it up for power reasons, as a
threat against the domestic work force. And this is true in case after
case.

Take another current example. It indicates that this is not abstract.
It’s very real. It is the trade war that’s going on with Japan. Have a close
look at it. The U.S. is trying to get Japan to open its markets to auto
parts manufactured by U.S. manufacturers. That’s the big issue. But
when the Wall Street Journal interviewed the CEOs of the corporations
that make the parts, they said of course they’d be delighted to have the
Japanese markets open. But they said that they would not supply them
from U.S. plants. They would mostly supply them from plants in Asia.
Because they’ve built up a network of producers elsewhere where they
again get much cheaper workers and, of course, are much closer to the
Japanese market. So if Japan capitulates in this conflict, it’s not
(according to the Wall Street Journal analysis, at least) very likely that
there will be many more American jobs, though there will be plenty
more American profits.

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DB Why is Clinton pushing Japan now?

He would like to see the U.S. auto makers and their investors make
more profits.

DB What might happen if the World Trade Organization hears this
case and it goes against the U.S. ?

GATT, which was the predecessor of the World Trade Organization,
has ruled against the U.S. on a number of occasions. They just don’t pay
any attention. And nobody is going to put any pressure on the U.S. It’s
just too big. There are mechanisms in the international trade
organizations. GATT and the World Trade Organization have methods to
penalize countries that don’t play by the rules. But just remember what
the methods are. For example, if, say, Nicaragua objects to U.S.
violations of the GATT rules, as it did, and if GATT concludes that
Nicaragua is right, as it did, Nicaragua is then completely free to
penalize the U.S. by raising its tariffs on U.S. imports, let’s say. That’s
not even a joke. On the other hand, if the U.S. wants to do something to
Nicaragua, they can kill it, by the same rules. But who’s going to try to
close their markets to U.S. exports?

DB A couple of months ago we talked about the World Court case
involving Portugal and Australia on East Timor oil. Is there any update
on that?

There won’t be for several months. The litigation was completed
around early February. Then the court takes a number of months to
reach a decision. People are guessing probably in the fall. It won’t be

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very easy to keep informed. As far as I’m aware — I haven’t checked it in
the data base — but I haven’t seen any reference to the World Court case
in the U.S.

DB How did you hear about it?

I know about it from other sources. For one thing, it’s all over the
Australian, Portuguese, and European press.

DB At a talk you gave at MIT on May 9th for the striking and locked-
out workers in Decatur, you made a couple of interesting comments
that I'd like you to expand on. You said the current political climate in
the U.S. “is kind of an organizer’s dream. . . . It’s a situation in which
the opportunities for organizing and rebuilding a democratic culture
are very, very high." What’s the basis of your optimism?

Actually, to give credit where it’s due, I was stealing a line from my
friend Mike Albert, who made that comment. I think the comment is
accurate. There is a general mood of fear and concern and
disillusionment and cynicism and recognition that things aren’t going
right which is based in reality. For maybe eighty percent of the
population living standards have either been stagnant or have actually
declined over the last fifteen years or so. They don’t see any hope of
anything better. Their anger is mostly focused on government, not on the
Fortune 500. But that’s the result of very effective propaganda over
many years, which kind of puts in the shadow the source of decision
making. But the concerns are there. If they can be mobilized, there
could be a very constructive response. Again, let’s make it concrete.
Take these people who call themselves “militias." They’re not militias, of
course. Militias are things set up by states. But these paramilitary

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organizations that are called militias — people like the Timothy
McVeighs, assuming that the government’s story is accurate — if you look
at those people, who are they? They’re mostly white, working-class men
with something like high school educations. They’re pretty much the
kind of people who were building the CIO sixty years ago. Why aren’t
they doing something similar now? It’s an organizer’s dream, but they’re
not being organized.

DB Right.

In fact, you remember in the meeting, when the worker from Staley
was talking?

DB Very well.

I thought he gave a very eloquent talk. I don’t know if you have it on
tape, but if you do you ought to play it. He’s describing his picture of
what he wanted his life to be and thought it ought to be. I'll bet you that
if you were to pick a person at random from those paramilitary groups,
you’d get the same picture or something similar to it. If people like the
guy who was talking are driven — if that life is taken away from them,
and the possibilities of their having a meaningful existence with serious
work and family life and the rest of what he was saying — there’s nothing
unreasonable that he was asking for, not at all. In fact, it was
praiseworthy. But if those possibilities are taken away, they’re going to
go in one of two directions. Either they too will be doing something like
joining paramilitary groups, or some other destructive activity (there are
plenty of possibilities) or they will be the people who will rebuild the
civil society that’s being dismantled and restore some semblance of a
democratic system. The differences between him and the people in the

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paramilitary groups I think are differences of commitment and
understanding, not so much a social background or even goals,
necessarily.

DB / noticed particularly after you came back from Australia in late
January your spirits were really up and you had a lot of energy. It
seems to have sustained itself through this whole spring period. Am I
seeing you correctly?

I don’t know. It was a kind of a shot in the arm in many ways. It was
sort of exhilarating. But I doubt that it would have been very different.
There’s a kind of natural cycle of activism and things to do and energy
and a decline as things quiet down.

DB Your academic year is almost over.

But it’s not just the academic year. The point is that the rhythm of
activism in the U.S., meaning organized activities, meetings, talks, and
so on, that’s pretty correlated with the academic year. So things do die
down around June.

DB Are you looking forward to the summer at Weitfieet, on the
Cape?

Yes. Plenty of work to do. It’ll be good to be away for a bit, and I’ve
got a ton of things to do.

DB And you get a little sailing and swimming in on the side?

I hope so. We’ll see.

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DB See you at the Z Media Institute in Woods Hole in a few weeks.
Take care.

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DB You Ve been following the World Court case, the Timor Gap
Treaty involving Portugal and Australia. What’s happened with that?

On June 30th the World Court announced its decision, actually non-
decision. It decided to evade the issue. There were procedural issues,
like, Can they go ahead at all with Indonesia not there, and then if they
had agreed to that there would have been the substantive issues, but
they stopped on the procedural issues. On a vote of 12-3, they said that
they could not proceed without Indonesia present, so the issue’s dead.
On the other hand, if you read the whole ruling, it’s not completely
empty. For example, they did say that there can be no doubt under
international law that East Timor has the inalienable right of self-
determination; but they said they can’t proceed any further on the
technical matter of the treaty without one of the parties present, and
Indonesia refuses to take part, just like the U.S. on Nicaragua. In
Nicaragua they did go ahead, but on this one they didn’t.

DB You’ve commented on the relative power of Australia vis-a-vis
Portugal in arguing this case.

I haven’t seen the whole record, but what I saw of Portugal’s case

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didn’t look to me very impressive. And Australia had (again, what I saw
of it) they did it cleverly in the legal sense. After all, we have to
remember that even at the World Court or the Supreme Court the law is
to a considerable extent a sort of duel where truth and significance are
around the fringes somewhere. A lot of it is show and technique. One
thing that Australia brought up that embarrassed Portugal a lot,
although it’s irrelevant, had to do with their dealings with Morocco and
Western Sahara, which the Australians brought up to show, You’re just
being hypocritical. Two seconds’ worth of thought shows that whether
they’re being hypocritical or not has zero to do with this case. But in the
court deliberations and the colloquy they apparently have a lot to do
with it. That’s standard courtroom procedure. And the Australians
seemed pretty good at that. It’s a First World country, and they know
how to play these games.

DB I’m not familiar with the Portuguese position. Are they in favor
of the Moroccan annexation of Western Sahara?

I don’t know the exact details, but they apparently made some kind
of deal with Morocco about maybe Western Saharan minerals or
something. The Australians brought this up and said, This is a parallel,
so how can you even bring up the case of East Timor? At most what it
shows is that Portugal is hypocritical, which is not the issue. But as
courts work, it was an issue.

DB You Ve just returned from a series of talks in Washington and
Oregon. There were the by now customary huge turnouts and standing
ovations and the like. But I sense you feel some disquiet. What’s that
about ?

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To tell you the honest truth, when I see a huge mob, which is pretty
common these days, I have a mixture of feelings. Partly I’m sort of
depressed about it, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, there’s just too
much personalization. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s worrisome. The
other thing is that the ratio of passive participation to active engagement
is way too high. These were well-arranged talks. For example, they did
what a lot of people don’t do and ought to do. Every place I went there
were a dozen tables outside with every conceivable organization having
leaflets and handouts and sign-up sheets and telling what they’re up to.
So if people want to do anything there are easy answers to what you can
do in your own community. The question that comes up over and over
again, and I don’t really have an answer still, (really, I don’t know any
other people who have answers to them), is, It’s terrible, awful, getting
worse. What do we do? Tell me the answer. The trouble is, there has
not in history ever been any answer other than, Get to work on it.

There are a thousand different ways of getting to work on it. For one
thing, there’s no “it." There’s lots of different things. You can think of
long-term goals and visions you have in mind, but even if that’s what
you’re focused on, you’re going to have to take steps towards them. The
steps can be in all kinds of directions, from caring about starving
children in Central America or Africa, to working on the rights of working
people here, to worrying about the fact that the environment’s in serious
danger. There’s no one thing that’s the right thing to do. It depends on
what your interests are and what’s going on and what the problems are
and so on. And you have to deal with them. There’s very little that
anybody can do about these things alone. Occasionally somebody can,
but it’s marginal. Mainly you work with other people to try to develop
ideas and learn more about it and figure out appropriate tactics for the
situation in question and deal with them and try to develop more
support. That’s the way everything happens, whether it’s small changes

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or huge changes.

If there is a magic answer, I don’t know it But it sounds to me as if
the tone of the questions and part of the disparity between listening and
acting suggests — I’m sure this is unfair — Tell me something that’s going
to work pretty soon or else I'm not going to bother, because I've got
other things to do. Nothing is going to work pretty soon, at least if it’s
worth doing, nor has that ever been the case.

To get back to the point, even in talks like these, the organizers told
me they did get a fair amount of apparent engagement. People would
ask, Can I join your group? or What can I do? or Do you have some
suggestions? If that works, okay, it’s fine. But usually, there’s a kind of
chasm between the scale of the audience, and even its immediate
reaction, and the follow-up. That’s depressing.

DB You continue to be in tremendous demand for these speaking
engagements. Are you considering stopping?

I would be delighted to stop. For me it’s not a great joy, frankly. I do
it because I like to do it. You meet wonderful people and they’re doing
terrific things. It’s the most important thing I can imagine doing. But if
the world would go away, I'd be happy to stop. What ought to be
happening is that a lot of younger people ought to be coming along and
doing all these things. If that happens, fine. I’m glad to drift off into the
background. That’s fine by me. It’s not happening much. That’s another
thing that I worry about. There’s a real invisibility of left intellectuals
who might get involved. I’m not talking about people who want to come
by and say, okay, I’m your leader. Follow me. I'll run your affairs.
There’s always plenty of those people around. But the kind of people
who are just always doing things, like whether it was workers’ education
or being in the streets or being around where there’s something they can

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contribute, helping organizing — that’s always been part of the vocation
of intellectuals from Russell and Dewey on to people whose names you
never heard of but who are doing important things. There’s a visible gap
there today, for all kinds of reasons. A number of people involved in
these things have been talking about it. I’m sure you’ve heard of others.

DB / wouldn’t entirely agree. There are some voices out there , like
Holly Sklar, Winona LaDuke, and others that represent a younger
generation.

It’s not zero. But I think it’s nothing like the scale of what it ought to
be or indeed has been in the past. Maybe it was that way in the past for
not great reasons. A lot of those people were around the periphery of,
say, the Communist Party, which had its own serious problems. But
whatever the reasons, I think there’s a very detectable fact. There’s
plenty of left intellectuals. They’re just doing other things. Most of those
things are not related to, are sometimes even subversive to these kinds
of activities.

DB A talk you gave in Martha’s Vineyard in late August on corporate
power was broadcast on C-SPAN a couple of weeks ago. What’s been
the response to that?

The usual. There’s a huge flood of letters which I’m trying to answer,
slowly. Many of them are mixed. Many of them are very engaged, very
concerned. People say, It’s terrible. I’m glad somebody’s talking about it.

I think the same way. What can I do, very often. There’s a strange
fringe. A fair number of people interpret me as saying things that are
very remote from what I mean. I’ll get a very enthusiastic letter saying
this is great, I’m so glad to hear it, marvelous and wonderful, thanks,

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etc. I'd like to share with you what I've done about this. Then comes
some document which is in my view often off the wall, but anyway
completely unrelated to anything I’m talking about. So somewhere we’re
not connecting. I think I even sort of know why. There’s a strange
cultural phenomenon going on. It’s connected with this enormous
growth of cultism, irrationality, dissociation, separateness, and isolation.
All of this is going together. I think another aspect is the way the
population is reacting to what’s happening to them. By margins that are
by now so overwhelming that it’s even front-page news, people are
strenuously opposed to everything that’s going on and are frightened and
angry and are reacting like punch-drunk fighters. They’re just too alone,
both in their personal lives and associations and also intellectually,
without anything to grasp. They don’t know how to respond except in
irrational ways. In some ways it has sort of the tone of a devastated
peasant society after a plague swept it or an army went through and
ruined everything. People have just dissolved into inability to respond.

It’s kind of dramatic when you take, say, the opposite extreme in the
hemisphere: Haiti. Here’s the poorest country in the hemisphere. It’s
suffered enormous terror. People live in complete misery. I've seen a lot
of Third World poverty, but it’s pretty hard to match what you find in the
marketplaces in Port-au-Prince, let alone the hills. Here you have the
worst conceivable situation, unimaginably horrible conditions. Poor
people, people in the slums, peasants in the hills, managed to create out
of their own activity a very lively, vibrant civil society with grassroots
movements and associations and unions and ideas and commitment
and hope and enthusiasm and so on which was astonishing in scale, so
much so that without any resources they were able to take over the
political system. Of course it’s Haiti, so the next thing that comes is the
hammer on your head, which we sort of help to wield, but that’s another
story. However, even after it all, apparently, it still survives. That’s under

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the worst imaginable conditions.

Then you come to the U.S., the best imaginable conditions, and
people simply haven’t a clue as to how to respond. The idea that we
have to go to Haiti to teach them about democracy ought to have
everyone in stitches. We ought to go there and learn something about
democracy. People are asking the question here, What do I do? Go ask
some illiterate Haitian peasant. They seem to know what to do. That’s
what you should do.

There’s another aspect to this, another question that’s pretty
common. I commonly say, and I believe, that this is a very free society,
at least for people who are relatively privileged, which is an enormous
number of people. The capacity of the government to coerce is very
slight. A very common response (I heard it any number of times on this
latest tour, but elsewhere as well) is, What about Kent State?
Incidentally, not Jackson State. That rarely comes up. What about Joe
McCarthy? Even that doesn’t get mentioned because that wouldn’t be
relevant. I said “relatively privileged people.” If you’re a black organizer
in the slums, sure, you have a lot of problems. But most of us aren’t.
Anyhow, the sense that there is repression here is enormous. In
comparison, I was in Haiti briefly right at the height of the terror, and
people were scared out of their wits, and rightly, but they didn’t feel they
had to stop because maybe someday there would be repression. If you
compare the amount of repression that there is here with what there is
in most of the world, where people don’t even think about it — they just
continue — it’s pretty shocking.

DB So that perception of omnipotent government power, do you
attribute that to propaganda?

In a very broad sense I’d attribute it to propaganda, but here you

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have to take the term “propaganda" pretty broadly. The whole doctrinal
system, including the entertainment industry, the corporate media, the
educational system, the political system, and everything else, there’s a
public relations industry and a huge system that has been devoting itself
for a long time very intensively and even self-consciously since the
Second World War towards several tasks. One of them is demonizing
unions. Another is making people hate and fear the government, which
you might think is a little contradictory, since they control the
government. But it’s not. There are plenty of things wrong with the
government. But that’s not what they’re worried about. What they’re
worried about is the one thing that’s right about it, namely, it’s
potentially influenceable by the population.

That’s not true of private tyrannies. General Electric is not
influenceable by the population except very indirectly through regulatory
mechanisms which are very weak and which they mostly control
anyhow. But you can’t vote to decide what they ought to do, and you
can’t participate in those decisions. Those are tyrannies. Imagine
yourself in the office of a public relations firm trying to turn people into
the ideal state, namely manipulable atoms of consumption who are
going to devote their energies to buying things that they don’t want
because you tell them that’s what they want — advertising. They’re never
going to get together to challenge anything, and they won’t have a
thought in their heads except doing what they’re told. A perfect utopia.
Suppose you’re trying to do that. What you do is get them to hate and
fear the government, fear the bigness of the government. But not look at
the Fortune 500, nor even medium-sized businesses, not ask how they
work, not ask what were truisms to important mainstream political
economists like Robert Brady sixty years ago, and in fact to the working-
class movement throughout its history. These things are just tyrannical,
totalitarian systems. You don’t want people to see that. You want them

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to worry about the one thing that they might get involved in and that
might even protect them from the depredations of private power. What
would make sense would be to develop a mood of anti-politics. And it’s
worked. People hate the government, fear the government, are worried
about the bureaucrats.

Take, say, health. A lot of concern that government bureaucrats will
be controlling it. There are many more bureaucrats in insurance offices
controlling you. But that’s not what people worry about. It’s not those
pointy-headed bureaucrats in insurance offices who are making us fill
out these forms and telling us what to do and we’ve got to pay for their
lunches and their advertising while they propagandize us. That’s not
what people’s anger and fear is focused on. What it’s focused on,
through very conscious manipulation and perfectly rational design, is
this dangerous federal bureaucracy.

Actually, what’s going on now with the attempt at devolution,
reducing decision making to the state level — that makes great sense if
you believe in tyranny. There are circumstances in which regionalization
would be a very good move. Devolution, lowering the level of power and
decisionmaking closer to the popular level, could be a step toward
democracy, but not when you’ve got private tyrannies around. When
you’ve got private tyrannies around, the only institution that at least in
part reflects public involvement, that can cope with them, is a very
powerful one, namely, the federal government. Let’s say you send block
grants down to the state. That’s a way of guaranteeing that they’re not
going to get to poor people. Any even middle-sized business has all
kinds of ways of pressuring states to make sure that that money ends up
in their pockets and not in the pockets of hungry children. People can do
this through regressive fiscal measures, the whole range of subsidies
that governmental institutions provide to private powers that can
threaten them — I'll move to Tennessee tomorrow — so sure, devolution

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under these circumstances is a great way to increase tyranny and to
decrease the threat of democracy as well as to shift resources even more
dramatically toward the rich and away from the poor. That’s the obvious
consequence of devolution. But I’ve never seen it discussed in the
mainstream, although it’s the obvious point.

What’s discussed is complete irrelevancies, like whether we can trust
the governors to care for the poor. What’s that got to do with anything?
It’s totally meaningless. But that kind of absurdity is what’s discussed,
but not the obvious, overwhelming fact that distributing governmental
resources to the lower levels will simply make them more susceptible to
influence and control by private power. That’s the major fact. And it’s
part of the same anti-politics. We want to weaken the federal
government.

Incidentally, that’s only half true. The federal government is not being
weakened. It’s just being changed. The security system is going up, not
only the Pentagon, but even the internal security system, jails, etc. That
aspect of the government is going up. That’s not just for control,
although it’s partly for that. It’s also because it’s part of the way of
transferring resources to the rich, which is virtually never discussed. In
fact, it’s almost off the agenda, unless you read the business press. But
it’s overwhelmingly significant. It ought to be a front-page article every
day. By now it is so obvious it’s hard to miss. The Russians are gone.
The Pentagon stays the same, in fact it’s even going up. We were told
for fifty years, which of course was always ridiculous, that we need this
huge military to defend us from the Russians. How stupid can you be,
and how indoctrinated can you be? Don’t you ever ask a question about
what happened? What happened is, it’s there for the same reason it
always was. How else are Newt Gingrich’s rich constituents going to
stay rich? You obviously can’t subject them to market discipline. They’ll
be out selling rags. They wouldn’t know what it means to exist in a

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market. What they know is, the government puts money in their
pockets, and the main way it does it is through the whole Pentagon
system. In fact, the criminal security system is beginning to take on this
character. It’s reached, if not the scale of the Pentagon, it’s reached a
sufficient scale so that the big investment firms and even high-tech
industry, defense industry, are getting intrigued by the prospects of
feeding at another public cash cow. That’s going up. So it’s not that the
government is getting weaker.

But this long and very successful effort over many, many years to get
people to focus their fears and angers and hatred on the government has
had its effect. We all know there’s plenty to be upset about there. The
primary thing to be upset about is that it is not under popular influence.
It is under the influence of the private powers. That’s the primary source
of things we ought to worry about. But then to deal with that by giving
private, unaccountable power even more power is just beyond absurdity.
It’s a real achievement of doctrinal managers to have been able to carry
this off.

DB You’ll recall Orwell’s Animal Farm: Two feet bad, four feet good.
Public sector bad, private sector good. It’s kind of playing out right
now.

It’s kind of intriguing. Economists know that this is mostly nonsense.
But they don’t talk about it, except to each other. If you really look at the
mantras, take, say, “Public sector bad." What does that mean? Is there
some evidence that privatization is a good idea? It’s just something you
repeat because it’s drilled into your head. Sure, privatization makes
things more efficient. Does it? There are experiences. For example, we
can look at Mexico. What privatization did was rapidly increase the
number of millionaires, accelerate the decline of real wages and social

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conditions. Did it make things better? Well, yes, for 24 billionaires. You
can object and say, That’s Mexico, a corrupt Third World country. So
let’s take England, which is a couple of steps ahead of us in
privatization. Under Thatcher they privatized the water system. It was a
public utility. So now it’s private. What’s happened? You can even read
about it on the front page of the Financial Times. You don’t have to go
to obscure publications any more. And they’re pretty irate. What
happened is, profits have gone through the roof, prices have gone way
up, and service has gone way down. In fact, sooner or later, it’s not very
far from now you’ll be hearing proposals from the private owners that it’s
not cost-effective to deliver water to scattered or small communities.
What they ought to do is go to a pump in the center of town and pick it
up with buckets because any smart economist can prove that that’s
more cost-effective and improves the GNP and that’s the best
distribution of resources. Sure, that’s privatization.

And, not for obscure reasons, a private corporation is not in the
business of being humanitarian. It’s in the business of increasing profit
and market share. Doing that typically is extremely harmful to the
general population. It may make some numbers look good. It may create
what’s called an “economic miracle," meaning great for investors and
murderous for the population. But there’s no reason to think it’s a good
thing. What’s claimed is, look at the inefficiency and corruption of the
public institutions, which is true. Are the private ones better? The
evidence for this is, as far as I know, nonexistent. What can be pointed
out, and it’s correct, is that public industrial systems, like the Brazilian
steel industry, often lost money. But that loss of money was part of a
way of subsidizing private industry. So if you keep steel prices artificially
low, that will be a gain for the people who are using steel, even though
that system will run at a loss.

On the other hand, if you think about the effect over the whole

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economy, it’s much more complicated a story, and I don’t think there’s
any single answer to it. Sometimes private industry has been efficient,
and sometimes even helpful to people, which is quite different from
being inefficient, in fact often unrelated to it. Sometimes it has, and
many times it hasn’t. It depends on the circumstances, on factors that
people don't understand very well. But the idea that somehow
privatization automatically improves things is absurd.

DB In Australia earlier this year you commented that you felt like
you were in somewhat of an odd situation in terms of your own political
philosophy. You are defending the notion of the state and the role of
the state , that the state has an active role to play to protect people’s
interests.

This was actually an address at an anarchist conference. I pointed
out what I think is true, that your goals and your visions are often in
direct conflict. Visions are long-term things, what you’d like to achieve
down the road. But if we mean by goals that which we’re trying to do
tomorrow, they can often appear to be in conflict with long-term visions.
It’s not really a conflict. I think we’re in such a case right now. In the
long term I think the centralized political power ought to be eliminated
and dissolved and turned down ultimately to the local level, finally, with
federalism and associations and so on. Sure, in the long term that’s my
vision. On the other hand, right now I'd like to strengthen the federal
government. The reason is, we live in this world, not some other world.
And in this world there happen to be huge concentrations of private
power which are as close to tyranny and as close to totalitarian as
anything humans have devised, and they have extraordinary power.
They are unaccountable to the public. There’s only one way of defending
rights that have been attained or extending their scope in the face of

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these private powers, and that’s to maintain the one form of illegitimate
power that happens to be somewhat responsive to the public and which
the public can indeed influence. So you end up supporting centralized
state power even though you oppose it. People who think there is a
contradiction in that just aren’t thinking very clearly.

DB There are two visions of the role of government. James Madison
in 1 787 saw its role as “to protect the minority of the opulent against
the majority.” Then you have FDR in 1937 saying, “The test of our
nation’s progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of
those who have much. It is whether we provide enough for those who
have little.” Obviously one of those visions is dominant today. Why?

In the case of Madison, you have to be a little more careful. That was
indeed Madison’s main theme, and that’s what you ought to learn in
elementary school, because that in fact won. The Constitution was
framed in Madisonian terms. He had a more complex argument. He was
strongly opposed to democracy and warned against it. He talked about
England, which was the model of the day, and said, If those guys had
democracy over there the people would get together and take over the
estates of the landed proprietors, and use their property for themselves
instead of allowing the rich and powerful to maintain it. So obviously we
can’t have democracy. We don’t want anything like that to happen here.
So democracy is a bad thing. The prime responsibility of government is
to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, and we have
to set up the constitutional system so that this will work.

But there’s a hidden theme there. The hidden theme is that he is pre-
capitalist. Capitalism was just in its early origins, and he was basically
opposed to it. His idea was that the opulent minority are going to be
benevolent aristocrats, Enlightenment gentlemen who sit around reading

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philosophy and who are genuine conservatives in an old-fashioned
sense, a sense which doesn’t exist in the U.S.: Conservatives in the
European sense, who would be enlightened and benevolent. So they’ll
be like benevolent tyrants. So that’s not inconsistent with what
Roosevelt was saying, except with regard to the institutional structure.

Madison also quickly learned that that’s not the case. A couple of
years later he was bitterly condemning the system that he had created
and talking about the “daring depravity of the times” as the rising class
of business people become the “tools and tyrants” of government,
overwhelming it with their force and benefiting from its gifts. That’s a
pretty good description of what’s going on today. That was in the
1790s. When he saw that the minority of the opulent are not nice
gentlemanly aristocrats or Enlightenment philosophers who are going to
make sure that everybody is healthy and happy, he was outraged and
infuriated. Nevertheless, the picture he presented, extricated from the
context in which he understood it, has been the dominant view and now
has reached an overwhelming level.

It’s not anything new, incidentally. The 1920s were not all that
different. A century ago was not all that different.

DB Isn’t it true that one of the tenets of classical conservative
economics and philosophy is an antipathy toward concentration of
power, toward monopoly? Yet these “Contractors,” if you will, who call
themselves conservatives, are advocating policies that are accelerating
concentration.

What we call conservatism, what used to be called liberalism — the
terms are confusing — but classical liberalism was strongly opposed to
concentration of power. Not what we call liberalism. It’s what today we
call conservatism. The terms have totally shifted in meaning, if they ever

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had any. The views of, say, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, the
intellectual founders of what people pay homage to but don’t understand
or choose not to understand, those people were certainly opposed to
concentration of power. And it’s true that the people who call
themselves, say, libertarians today, whatever they may have in their
minds, they are in fact advocating extreme concentration of power, in
fact they’re advocating some of the most totalitarian systems that
humans have ever suffered under. That’s not their intent, of course. But
if you read Adam Smith, part of his argument for the market was that it
would lead to perfect equality, equality of condition, not just equality of
opportunity. Like Madison, he was a pre-capitalist and anti-capitalist
person with roots in the Enlightenment and had a very different vision of
the way things ought to work out. You can ask whether his argument
was very good. We really don’t know, experimentally, because his
argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty a market would
lead to equality of condition and of course we don’t remotely approach
that. But that aside, whatever you think about the intellectual character
of his argument, it’s clear what the goal was. And yes, the classical
liberals, the Jeffersons and the Smiths, were opposing the
concentrations of power that they saw around them, like the feudal
system and the Church and royalty. They thought that ought to be
dissolved. They didn’t see other forms of concentration of power which
only developed later. When they did see them, they didn’t like them.
Jefferson was a good example. He was strongly opposed to the
concentrations of power that he saw developing, and warned that the
banking institutions and the industrial corporations which were barely
coming into existence in his day would destroy the achievements of the
Revolution. As I mentioned, Madison within a few years was already
having very strongly stated second thoughts about what he had framed
and created.

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Here there are illusions that have to be dismantled from beginning to
end. Take, say, David Ricardo, who actually is much more the godfather
of contemporary neoliberal economics than Adam Smith, who was a
pre-capitalist. Take a look at his famous law of comparative advantage,
which we’re supposed to worship. It sort of works on his assumptions,
but his assumptions are that capital would be pretty much immobile,
partly because capital was land and land can’t be moved, but partly for
other reasons. He thought capital would be relatively immobile because
capitalists are nice human beings and they care about the people around
them, so they’re not going to move their capital across the world
because that would harm the people in their community and their
country and naturally they have a lot of concern for them. Again, that’s a
pre-capitalist thought. Within capitalist ideology, that’s a monstrosity.
You're not supposed to care about anything except maximizing your own
wealth. So Ricardo in the early nineteenth century was reflecting the
residue of the pre-capitalist era, in part at least, although he’s an
interesting mixture.

All of the humane Enlightenment aspects of this have been
eliminated, and rightly, because the logic of the capitalist enterprise is,
You should not have human feelings. You should just be trying to
maximize your own wealth and power. On the one hand, the idea that
capitalist entrepreneurs ever thought they should be subjected to market
discipline is ridiculous. You use state power as much as you can. This is
again something known to economic historians, but they don’t really
look at it in a comprehensive way. So, for example, there are good
studies showing very persuasively that, say, in the history of the U.S.
that its economic growth was very closely correlated with its extremely
high level of protectionism. Its biggest growth period in the late
nineteenth century was a period in which tariffs here were five or ten
times as high as in most of Europe, and that was great for the U.S.

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economy. That’s very general for every developed society.

On the other hand, that very much understates the case, because
there are other things you don’t look at if you’re an economist. It’s
somebody else’s field. For example, one reason why the Industrial
Revolution was able to be so successful in England and the U.S. was
because of cheap cotton. What made cotton cheap? Extermination or
elimination of the native population and bringing in slaves. That’s a
rather serious government intervention in the market, more than a slight
market distortion. But that doesn’t count. And the same economic
historians will accept all sorts of myths about how developed countries
used state intervention. They say that protectionism stopped in the U.S.
after 1945, when the U.S. turned toward liberal internationalism. There
was indeed pressure to lower tariffs. For one thing, it’s not quite true
that protectionism stopped. The Reaganites virtually doubled one or
another form of protection.

But even if we were to agree protectionism didn’t stop, it would be
largely beside the point, because there was another form of state
intervention in the economy, a massive form that developed at that
point, but that’s not the topic of economists, namely, the whole
Pentagon system, which has overwhelmingly been a way of funneling
public resources to advanced sectors of industry, and in fact was largely
designed for that purpose. That they talk about in some other
department.

If you put all these things together, you find that the doctrines of the
market are mainly weapons to beat people over the head with. We don’t
use them ourselves. And when you actually look at the founders, they
had all sorts of different ideas on the market. They were coming out of a
truly conservative tradition, one that we don’t have, which was rooted in
the Enlightenment and existing institutions and was concerned with
things like sympathy and solidarity and benevolent care, a lot of it very

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autocratic. That’s all dissolved under the impact of a sort of hypocritical
capitalist ideology which means capitalism for you, but protection for
me.

DB You Ve made a bit of a name for yourself in the field of
linguistics and language. It’s interesting, in the current political scene,
how much the passive voice is used. There’s an article on income
inequality in the New Yorker (October 16), for example, which is
replete with this. Inequality happens. There’s no agency. There’s no
active voice. People are getting poorer. No one is making them poor. It
just happens.

Or “people were killed," not “we’re killing them.” That’s absolutely
standard. In fact, that’s the beautiful thing about the passive voice and
other such devices. It makes it look as if things happen without an
agent, and that’s very useful when the agent shouldn’t be identified
because it’s too close to home. Virtually all discussions of aggression
and terror take place in this framework. But you’re right, now the idea
is, something strange is just happening to the economy, which is forcing
inequality. Maybe automation or trade. Nobody really knows. We can’t
do anything about it.

But these are social decisions. They’re very easy to trace. You know
who’s making the decisions and why. Not exactly, but certainly to a very
substantial extent we know why these things are happening. You can
identify the factors in them. You can see that they are by no means
inevitable. There are people who are saying very sensible things about
automation and the end of work. And there’s a real problem. People
aren’t going to get jobs because maybe someday robots will do their
work. While I agree with that if you put extremely narrow bounds on the
discussion, in a general sense it’s completely untrue. Take a walk

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through Boston or any other city and see if you don’t see things around
where there’s work to be done. Then take a look at those people over
there who are idle and say, Wouldn’t they like to do the work? The
answer is yes to both. There is tons of work to be done, and lots of
people who would like to do the work. It’s just that the economic system
is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can’t even put together idle
hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and
which would be beneficial to all of us. That’s just the mark of a failed
system. The most dramatic mark of it. Work is not something that you
should try to escape from, or that ordinary human beings would want to
escape from. It’s something you want to do because it’s fulfilling, it’s
creative. There’s plenty of it around. It’s not being done because of the
extreme inadequacies of the socioeconomic system.

DB In a recent Covert Action Quarterly article you wrote that “The
terms of political discourse have been virtually deprived of meaning. "
We've talked about “conservative,” for example. How can it be
recovered? Is it something desirable?

Oh, sure. Evacuation of content from the terms of discourse is a very
useful device for dumbing people down. If it’s impossible to talk about
anything, then you’ve got them under control. There are things that we
ought to be able to talk about in ordinary, simple words. There’s nothing
terribly profound here, as far as I know. If there is, nobody has
discovered it. We ought to be able to talk about these things in simple,
straightforward words and sentences without evasion and without going
to some expert to try to make it look complicated for some other reason.
I'm not recommending anti-intellectualism. There are things to learn,
and they’re worth learning, but the topics we are now discussing are not
quantum physics. Anybody who’s interested can find out about them

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and understand them, as much as is necessary for rational behavior in
structures where you can make important decisions for yourself. We
ought to try to protect substantive discourse from the attacks on it from
all sides. A lot of it is from the left, I should say. One aspect of this is to
protect sensible discussion from anything that has the prefix “post-” in
it.

DB In that same article, you write about the “acceleration of the
deliberate policy of driving the country toward a Third World model,
with sectors of great privilege, growing numbers of people sinking into
poverty or real misery, and a superfluous population confined in slums
or expelled to the rapidly expanding prison system. " I think that’s a fair
summary of the current situation, but aren’t the social policies that are
producing those conditions a recipe for revolt and upheaval?

Sometimes they have been, sometimes they haven’t been. Slave
societies can exist for a long time. It’s not that it hasn’t been tried before
in industrial countries. Take, say, England right around the time of
Ricardo, in the 1820s, when a system very much like the one they’re
trying to impose now was indeed imposed for the first time in an
industrial country. The rulers got their way. They won political power in
the mid-1830s and pretty soon they instituted the program they wanted,
which was not all that different (though in a different world, of course)
from what is being preached today. There were problems. The British
army was spending most of its time putting down riots. Pretty soon
organizing began, the Chartist movement began, labor organizing began.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the classical economists who had
been deriding the idea of helping people because to help people harms
them, had changed their position. You read people like, say, Nassau
Senior, one of the old hawks of political economy. He was shifting

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towards saying, There’s something to all this stuff. Then you get to John
Stuart Mill in 1848 or so. That’s the foundation of the modern welfare
state. For a long time laissez-faire was a bad word. Why? Because, to
put it in a simple formula, the rich and powerful and their intellectuals,
the economists, were telling people, You don’t have a right to live. You
have a right to what you gain in the marketplace, but you don’t have any
other right to live, and any effort to help you is going to hurt you. Pretty
soon these strange people got the idea, We might not have a right to
live, by your lights, but you don’t have a right to rule. So we’re just going
to take it over and kick you out. That’s a little too far. The science, as it
was called and still is called, was a very pliable one. Ricardo had
compared the science of economics to Newton's laws, but it turned out
it wasn’t quite like that. When it became not usable as an instrument of
class war, it simply changed. All of a sudden it turned out, Sure, you
have a right to live and we have to adjust to your demands, because
otherwise we’re not going to have a right to rule.

Exactly what form that organizing will take now . . . it’s already taken
some form. It happens to be taking very antisocial forms. But that is a
reflection of social and cultural factors in the society. It doesn’t have to.
As I mentioned before, you go to the opposite extreme in our
hemisphere, to Haiti, where it took very constructive forms. So if it
doesn’t take constructive forms here, that’s our fault. We have no one to
blame but ourselves.

DB But let’s say you’re a CEO of a major corporation. Isn’t it in your
economic interest to keep enough change in my pocket so that I’ll buy
your products?

That’s an interesting question, and nobody knows the answer to it. It
was a question that had an answer in a national economy. So if you go

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back to the 1920s, at the time of the big automobile manufacturing
burst, that was the question that Henry Ford raised. He drew the
conclusion that you just drew. He said, I’d better give these guys a
decent wage or nobody’s going to buy my cars. So he raised workers'
salaries beyond what he was forced to by market pressures. And others
went along. That was on the reasoning that you just outlined, and it
made sort of sense in a national economy.

Does it make sense in an international economy? Does it make sense
in an international economy where you can shift production to the
poorest and most deprived and most depressed regions where you have
security forces keeping people under control and you don’t have to worry
about environmental conditions and you have plenty of women pouring
off the farms to work under impossible conditions and get burnt to death
in factory fires and die from overwork and somebody else replaces them
and that production is then integrated through the global system so that
value is added where you have skilled workers and maybe pay a little
more but you don’t have many of them? Finally it’s sold to the rich
people in all the societies. Even the poorest Third World country has a
very rich elite. As you take this kind of structural Third World model and
transfer it over to the rich countries — it’s a structural model, it’s not in
absolute terms — they have a sector of consumers that’s not trivial. Even
if there’s plenty of superfluous people and huge numbers in jail and a lot
of people suffering or even starving. So the question is, Can that work?
As a technical question, nobody really knows the answer. And it doesn't
make any difference anyway. We shouldn’t even be allowing ourselves to
ask it. The point is that whether it could work or not, it’s a total
monstrosity. Fascism works, too. In fact, it worked rather well from an
economic point of view. It was quite successful. That doesn’t mean it’s
not a monstrosity. So there is the technical question, Will it work? To
that nobody knows the answer. But there’s also a human question of

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whether we should even ask, and the answer to that is, Of course not.
That’s not the CEO’s question, but it should be everybody else’s.

DB What about the issue of the debt as a tactic of imposing a kind
of de facto structural adjustment in the U.S.?

There’s a lot to say about it. Basically, yes. What is being said about
the debt is for the most part nonsense. The one thing that is correct,
which is hidden there, is that it is a weapon for cutting back social
spending. In fact, it very likely was created for that reason. Most of the
debt is Reagan debt. If you look back, it’s clear at the time, and I think
it’s becoming clearer and clearer, that their borrow-and-spend lunacy
which did substantially increase the debt, like 80% as compared with
that accumulated over a couple hundred years, was conceived of and is
now being very efficiently used as a weapon to cut back those parts of
government that help the general population, while incidentally
increasing spending for those parts of the government that help the very
rich, like the Pentagon system.

k k k

November 3, 1995

DB To pick up where we left off the other day, maybe we should
make a distinction between what is called “the debt” and the deficit.

It’s just a technical difference. The deficit is a year-by-year
accounting of the ratio between income and outgo in each year. The
debt is what’s accumulated over time. So if the deficit stays high, the
debt will continue to grow. If the deficit can be negative, then the debt

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cuts down.

DB You mentioned that a lot is left out in the discussion about the
debt. Like what?

I should say it’s not left out by serious professional economists who
write about it, like Robert Eisner, who has done some of the best work.
But it’s left out of the public debate. One point is that the debt, though
high (and it certainly grew substantially during the Reagan years),
nevertheless is not high by either comparative or historical standards. So
in the past it has often been higher, and in other countries it’s higher.
“High” means relative to the total economy, GNP or GDP, whatever you
decide to measure. Relative to that, it’s not high.

The second point is that a debt is just part of living. There isn’t a
business around that isn’t in debt. You borrow for, say, capital
investment. Every person is in debt, virtually, unless they hide their
money under the mattress. Almost everyone who has a car or a home or
is sending their kids to college or doing anything is in debt. There’s
nothing wrong with that. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have a home or a
car or a television set. You wouldn’t be able to buy things on your
MasterCard. Your kids wouldn’t go to college. Debt is just the way the
system functions.

A third point is that the calculations for the federal government don’t
make any sense because they don’t distinguish between that part of the
debt that is for capital investment, and therefore contributes to economic
growth and in fact further income for the government and everybody
else, and that part of the debt which is just operating expenses. Every
business makes that distinction. Most of the states make that
distinction. Unless you make that distinction you’re just in a dream
world.

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So, to begin with, the whole thing is off the mark from the start. If
you ask about debt, the question to ask is, What’s it for? Take a family.
If you go to Las Vegas and spend all your money and end up in debt and
then you use the debt for more going to Las Vegas, that’s a bad use of
debt. If you use the same amount of borrowing for a house or a car or
your children’s education or putting into a business or buying books,
then it could be a fine debt, in fact very constructive. In fact, forgetting
what it does for you as a person, keeping to the strictest, narrowest
economic considerations, it can contribute to further income. That’s
exactly why businesses go into debt and people go into debt. One of the
reasons. For a business it’s about the only reason. For people there are
lots of good reasons.

When you turn to the government, you have to ask the same
question: What’s the borrowing for? If the point of the borrowing is to
put a lot of money into the pockets of Newt Gingrich’s rich constituents,
which is in fact what it’s for, it’s like going to Las Vegas and wasting
your money. On the other hand, if the same debt is used to improve
what’s called human capital, that means to help children be healthier,
better educated, more skilled, and so on — you have to put everything in
terms of the word “capital” to be serious, although it’s not serious. It’s
called “human capital." It’s part of our kind of insane ideology. So if it’s
used for human capital, by any measure it’s a wise debt. For example, it
will increase economic growth, because improving human capital is one
of the standard ways — the World Bank will tell you this — for increasing
economic growth. What is going to determine much of the quality of life
a little bit down the road — say you’re worried about your children — is
how the economy’s working. That will determine a large part of what
their lives are going to be like. It’s not the only thing, again, but let’s
keep to that. That will depend on things like whether there is an
educated, healthy, skilled population capable of increasing productivity

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and doing useful things, whether there’s a livable environment, so you’re
not falling on the floor and dying because of pollution. Whether there’s
infrastructure, like can you get to work without spending three hours in a
traffic jam, are there schools, are there hospitals — all of that is what
contributes to economic growth in the narrowest terms.

Incidentally, relative equality also contributes to economic growth.
Not too much is understood about these problems. Take the World
Bank. Go out to the limits. They recognize that one of the factors,
probably the major factor, that led to East Asian growth is relative
equality, high infrastructure spending, investment in education, all of
these things. It’s kind of common sense, and it’s shown by history. So if
public spending is used for those purposes, then it contributes to the
welfare of future generations, and then the debt is very wise, in fact it’s
contributing to growth.

This idea that we’re somehow putting a burden on future generations
by the debt is another small fraud. The debt is mostly owned by
Americans. The latest figures I've seen show about 80% owned by
Americans, which means that paying the debt goes back into the
pockets of American citizens. You could claim that it has a very negative
redistributive effect. That’s probably true. I don’t know if anybody knows
the numbers, but it stands to reason that the people who own Treasury
securities are not cab drivers. So the debt is by and large like other
forms of social policy, that is, a technique by which the poor pay off the
rich. But that’s internal to the country. It's not a matter of putting a
burden on your children, except in the sense that the whole regressive
system puts a burden on your children because they’re going to be doing
all sorts of things to pay off the rich. The debt is another one. But the
Gingrich line about how you’ve got to save future generations is not only
ridiculous, but it’s the opposite of the truth. By cutting back the kinds of
government spending they want cut back, they’re cutting back future

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economic growth and making life worse for the next generation, for just
the reasons I mentioned.

These are things which certainly have to be seriously taken into
consideration when you talk about the debt and the annual deficit.

Another factor has to do with what the public thinks of all of this.
Business is totally in favor of cutting it back. There’s overwhelming
support for it, even those parts of business that will be harmed by it.
That’s kind of interesting. Because apparently for them, the class
interest is overwhelming the immediate profit interest. So the class
interest of rolling back all the social programs and ensuring that the
government works only for the rich and destroying the regulatory
apparatus and improving the options for corporate crime, which is what
changing the tort system and the regulatory system means, all of that is
so overwhelmingly beneficial that they’re willing to face the costs, to
some extent, of less government service for the rich.

I should say only to some extent. If you look at the National
Association of Manufacturers, they’re calling for more government
assistance for, say, export promotion, meaning put money in their
pockets. Newt Gingrich is not calling for cutting down the Pentagon
system, putting money in the pockets of his rich constituents and others
like them. On the contrary. Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation want a
much bigger nanny state for the rich. So it’s mixed. But they're willing to
do things even that might harm profit because of the overwhelming
advantages of destroying a whole system which is preventing them from
robbing everybody blind. So that’s something.

So the business community is for it. Read Business Week. It’s
uniform. In the political system, the leadership of both parties (not the
scattered dissidents) is virtually 100% for it. So when Clinton goes on
the radio to criticize the Republican budget program, he says, Of course
we must balance the budget and eliminate the debt. That’s not even in

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question.

But there’s another segment of the country, namely, the population.
There are polls. There was recently a poll asking what people thought
the primary issue was in the country. 5% said the debt. 5% said
homelessness. So the number of people who think it’s the prime issue is
the same as the number of people who think it’s homelessness. That
shows you how people rank it. When asked, Should we eliminate the
debt, here the polls are very carefully crafted. There are two sets of
questions, one for headline writers and NPR and a set of questions for
people who want to know the answers. The questions for the headline
writers are, Would you like to see the debt eliminated? Most people say,
Yes. It’s like asking, Would you like your mortgage eliminated? That’s for
the headlines: Americans Voted for Balanced Budget. Everybody Wants
the Debt Eliminated. Americans Like the GOP Agenda, etc. Then comes
the question that matters: Do you want the debt eliminated or the deficit

reduced at the cost of . Then come a lot of “of’s”: cutback in

health care, environmental protection, education. Then it goes way
down. Depending on how the question is framed, it goes down to
roughly 25% thinking it should be done at all, let alone thinking it’s a
high priority. It’s like asking the question, Do you want your mortgage
eliminated at the cost of giving up your house? You get a different
answer to the question of would you like your mortgage eliminated. So
this is part of the scam done by the public relations industry for the
benefit of the doctrinal institutions. If you look at the bottom of the
column, where the headline says Americans Want Balanced Budget, you
sometimes get some of this data. So in general, the public is taking kind
of a realistic attitude. They don’t think it’s that important, it’s about at
the level of homelessness, and they don’t want it to happen at the cost
that it’s going to take.

Suppose you raised the serious question and said, Do you want the

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debt reduced at the cost of the health and welfare and economic growth
of the next generation? Because that’s what it means. I'm sure as soon
as this is laid out you’ll get overwhelming opposition, especially if it’s
understood exactly why this is the case.

On top of all of this, there is some historical experience. Here you
have to be pretty cautious, because very little is understood about these
matters, as the better economists will agree. It’s very speculative. But
there’s some evidence. For example, there have been periods of
attempts to balance the budget. I think there have been about half a
dozen since the 1820s. I think every single one has led very quickly to a
very serious recession or a deep depression. It’s not hard to see why. If
you think it through, you can see why that should be.

On the other hand, there are also rather sophisticated studies of the
effect of the deficit on things like consumption, investment, growth, and
so on. It tends to have a sort of positive correlation. It tends to be the
case that deficits contribute to growth, consumption levels, investment,
production, trade, the usual measures. These are complicated measures,
and you don’t want to say anything with much confidence. But it looks
like that, and you can see why it would be the case.

If you did a really serious analysis, which would be extremely hard,
you’d ask the same question as about a person borrowing. Do you
borrow so you can gamble in Las Vegas or do you borrow for your
children’s education? If you could ask that question, which is
sophisticated, and ask, Insofar as debt was used for productive
government investment, like infrastructure, health, the environment, and
so on, what was its effect? vs. debt for building the F-22, I’m pretty sure
you’d get a pretty sharp answer. But that’s a hard question to ask, and I
don’t think anybody’s asked it.

In any event, if you want to rethink the question of debt, you have to
start from the beginning and redo it from a totally different perspective.

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Again, if we had anything remotely like a free press around, these would
be the front-page stories, what they’d be telling people every day. You
can’t claim that they don’t tell you. If you really read everything, you’ll
find somebody saying this down on a back page or a piece of an op-ed.
But what people are deluged with is a different story. Unless you carry
out a research effort, it’s very hard to know anything about these topics.

Interesting to me is that despite the deluge, people do not believe
that the debt is an important issue. That’s pretty astonishing. I don’t
know how long that can go on.

DB One of the things you often do is challenge assumptions. So
many things are just taken for granted, and that’s what the discourse is
built upon. Like, We need to have a balanced budget. But citing a
recent CBS News-New York Times poll, Americans, when asked
whether they would want to sustain Medicare at current levels or
balance the budget, by 3 to I said that they would rather have
Medicare. This poll, incidentally, was described by the Speaker of the
House as an example of “disinformation.”

And the Times, which ran the poll well, for once (that was a lead
front-page story) didn’t mention that this has been a consistent figure all
the way back. So you go back to last December. There were similar
polls. Again it turns out, although the questions weren’t framed exactly
the same way, that when people were asked, Do you want budget
balancing at the cost of medical assistance, health care, again it was
about 3 to 1 opposed. So these are fairly steady figures, and it’s
interesting that they’re holding up despite the propaganda. When people
are asked, Would you like to have higher taxes for more medical
research, it’s about 75% in favor. I don’t remember the last numbers,
but quite consistently over the years the polls have indicated that people

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are in favor of higher taxes if they’re used for things like health or
education. Even foreign aid, believe it or not, if it goes to the poor. And
of course, overwhelmingly the population thinks that the government has
a responsibility to help the poor here.

They are also opposed to welfare, and that’s a success of the
propaganda system. But yes, these poll results were interesting and
important, have been consistent and generalized to almost everything
else. And it hasn’t gone totally unnoticed. For example, Brad
Knickerbocker is a well-known Washington correspondent for the
Christian Science Monitor. He’s dealing mostly with environmental and
energy issues these days. He had a column in which he said, kind of
quizzically, that it’s almost as if Congress is looking at the polls and
deciding to do the opposite. He was talking about environment and
energy issues, where again it’s extremely dramatic, but it generalizes
across the board. I think it’s hard to find a time in American history
when policy has been so radically opposed to public opinion on issue
after issue. It’s even true on the things that are going up.

The one big thing that’s going up is Pentagon spending. By about 6
to 1, the population wants it either stable or reduced. So even that is
overwhelmingly opposed by the public. What you’re getting in the
commentary is kind of interesting. Gingrich is plainly a total cynic, but a
pretty efficient one. His line, which is repeated by the Heritage
Foundation and the Cato Institute, is that there’s a philosophical issue.
People shouldn’t be compelled to pay for things they don't want, and
that’s why we have to cut down food for starving children. A lot of
people don’t want that, and our philosophy says they shouldn’t have to
pay for that. But somehow our philosophy says you can increase the
Pentagon budget over the opposition of maybe three-quarters of the
population because that puts money in my pockets. So there the
philosophical issue disappears. Fortunately philosophy is a pretty subtle

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discipline, as we teach around here, and Gingrich understands that,
along with the Heritage Foundation and the rest of the frauds who are
putting forth their ridiculous distortion of libertarian philosophy.

DB But there is a lot of confusion in the public. We talked about
this the other day. There are all kinds of contradictory currents that are
swirling around. For example, in a recent article you cited a poll in
which about 80 % of the population believes that the economic system
is “inherently unfair,” and the government is “run for the benefit of the
few and the special interests, not the people. " This is up from a steady
50%. But what is meant by “special interests”?

That’s a good question. I think I mentioned that in the article. I said
what they mean by “special interests" is another question. But these
questions have been asked for a long time in polls, a little differently
worded so you get some different numbers, but for a long time about
half the population was saying, when asked a bunch of open
questions — like, Who do you think the government is run for? would say
something like that: the few, the special interests, not the people. Now
it’s 82%, which is unprecedented. It means that 82% of the population
don’t even think we have a political system, not a small number.

What do they mean by special interests? Here you’ve got to start
looking a little more closely. Chances are, judging by other polls and
other sources of information, that if people are asked, Who are the
special interests? they will probably say, welfare mothers, government
bureaucrats, elitist professionals, liberals who run the media, unions.
These things would be listed. How many would say, Fortune 500, I
don’t know. Probably not too many. We have a fantastic propaganda
system in this country. There’s been nothing like it in history. It’s the
whole public relations industry and the entertainment industry. The

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media, which everybody talks about, including me, are a small part of it
I talk about mostly that sector of the media that goes to a small part of
the population, the educated sector. But if you look at the whole system,
it’s just vast. And it is dedicated to certain principles. It wants to destroy
democracy. That’s its main goal. That means destroy every form of
organization and association that might lead to democracy. So you have
to demonize unions. And you have to isolate people and atomize them
and separate them and make them hate and fear one another and create
illusions about where power is. A major goal of this whole doctrinal
system for fifty years has been to create the mood of what is now called
anti-politics.

That succeeded. People focus their anger and fear on the
government, the one part of the whole system of power that they can
influence, and don’t much see the real systems of power, the hand
that’s over it, the triviality stated by John Dewey that “Politics is the
shadow on society cast by big business.” It ought to be a truism, but few
people understand. So there’s plenty of confusion. And it shows up point
by point.

Take, say, unions. About 80% of the population think working people
don’t have enough influence on what goes on. On the other hand, a
great many people think unions have too much influence. There’s some
truth to that. Unions don’t really closely represent working people. So
there’s an element of truth to that. But that’s not what they mean. The
point is that democratic unions are the way in which working people
could have more of a say in things. But that’s been driven out of
people’s minds.

Or take, say, welfare, a dramatic case. I think the last figure I saw
was 80% of the population thought that the government has a
responsibility to help the poor. There is also substantial opposition to
welfare, which is the government helping the poor. The reason is the

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Reagan fairy tales: black mothers in Cadillacs, teenaged girls having
babies so that you’ll pay for them, all that kind of fraud. So people are
opposed to welfare. If that’s welfare, why should I pay for it? I want to
help the poor.

Also, people vastly overestimate the amount of money that goes to
welfare. The U.S. has always had quite low social expenditures by
comparative standards, and has been reducing them very sharply since
1970. For example, AFDC is now virtually wiped out, reduced by almost
a half since the 1970s. This feeling that there is a huge welfare burden
is a total joke. I’m not talking about the real welfare (to the rich), but
that trickle of welfare that goes to people who need help, which has
never been high, and it’s been declining very sharply. I think about a
third, a quarter of the population think it’s the biggest item in the federal
budget. It’s almost invisible. They feel the same thing about foreign aid,
which is really invisible. Again, about a quarter of the population think
it’s the biggest item in the federal budget. And they think they’re very
heavily taxed. We’re low taxed. And the taxes are extremely regressive.

There are two figures that are interesting, pre-tax income and actual
income post-tax and post-benefit. So if you take into account food
stamps, the effect of taxes, etc., and you ask, What do people have after
all that system’s done? — in most countries, other countries like ours, it
changes things a lot. Pre-tax inequality is not all that different in those
countries from here. In the U.S., post-tax inequality, including all of
these government transfers, is virtually the same as pre-tax. So the
whole system of taxes and benefits doesn’t change much. In most other
countries it changes a lot, which is why we have twice the level of
poverty of our next nearest competitor, England, and much more than
most other countries. Because the whole system doesn’t do much. It’s a
highly regressive system. If you did a serious count, which people don’t
do, it would be much more regressive.

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Consider, for example, that a lot of things that are taxes aren’t called
taxes. Take, say, New York City. It has just cut down expenditures for
mass transit. So that’s less tax money spent. On the other hand, they
raised fares, which means more taxes. Fares are just taxes by another
name. There’s a difference between the cuts and the taxes. The taxes
are regressive. First of all, even if executives and poor people took
subways to the same extent, it would be a highly regressive tax. But of
course they don’t. Overwhelmingly, the subways are used by the poor.
So this is a radically regressive tax, and it’s really socking it to people
who can’t pay for it and enriching the people who don’t have to. If you
look more closely, it’s even more dramatic. For example, the state
administration has given what they call “subsidies,” a funny word for it,
to public transportation, which means people’s money is being used for
themselves. But have a look at it. They’ve cut down quite significantly
the subsidy that goes to mass public transportation, like subways and
buses, and increased the amount that’s going to commuter rail lines.
Now they cut them both a little, but they cut the subways much more
than the commuter rail lines. In fact, the costs, the last figures I saw,
the state contribution to these was about ten to one in favor of
commuter rail lines. Who rides commuter rail lines? Executives living out
in Westchester County and Long Island. Who rides subways? People
living in Queens trying to get to Brooklyn, poor kids trying to get to
school. That’s taxes. If anybody were to take that stuff into account, you
would see that the system is ... in fact the system already is flat by
economists’ calculations, so to talk about a “flat tax" is a joke. That’s
just talking about making it more regressive. It’s already more or less flat
and has been, certainly, since the Reagan years. If you did a real
calculation, it’s not flat, because the real costs are imposed on the poor.

Take, say, Boston. I live in the suburbs, which are mostly fairly
wealthy people. You go a couple of miles from here and you get to the

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city, which is very poor people. I drove into Boston this morning. Who’s
paying for the fact that I can drive there? Who’s keeping the roads up?
Who’s paying for the local cops? Who’s paying for the services? Not the
guys who live in my suburb. We just rip off the poor people. And every
city works like that. It’s designed in such a way that the poor pay off the
rich by various techniques.

DB And who’s paying for the cheapest gasoline in the world?

That’s right.

DB The Pentagon.

Actually, you have to be a little careful. It’s keeping the oil prices
within a range. It doesn’t want them to get too low or too high. Because
if the prices get too low it harms the big energy companies, which are
mostly U.S. -based, the ones that aren’t British. And you don’t want that
to happen, because they’re an important part of the wealthy sector. On
the other hand, if it goes too high it harms other sectors of the economy.
So they’re always looking for it to be in a certain band. If you look at
policy over the years, it’s been, Not too high, not too low.

DB There’s a group here in Boston, Share the Wealth. They’ve been
doing a lot of research and reports on the tax code. They’re reporting
that in the 1950s corporations paid something like 40% of all the
taxes that IRS collected. In the 1990s it’s down to something like a
quarter of that. That might be a piece of information that would be of
interest to people.

It’s not just that. Take a look at state taxes and the rest. The tax code

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always was regressive. We never had much of a progressive tax. Take a
look at work by real analysts like Joseph Pechman and others from years
and years ago. They pointed out that if you calculate everything — state
taxes, sales taxes, the whole business — you get a rather flat tax. It’s
become much worse in the last couple of years. These are part of it. And
it’s getting worse. The programs that are currently on the table, which
they call flat tax programs — a meaningless term because we already
have a flat tax — to tilt the scale even more sharply against the poor, also
include things like a cutback on capital gains taxes. Capital gains
happen to be about half the income for the top one percent of the
population, then tailing off very, very sharply. That’s saying, If you’re in
the top one percent we’re going to not even tax you for half your income,
which is huge. All of these are complicated devices for ensuring that the
poor — like 80 % of the population — pay off the rich.

You read stories, like the article you gave me the other day from the
New Yorker by John Cassidy, about how all of this is the inexorable
workings of the capitalist system. The market in its genius is having
these unpleasant effects. That is simply nonsense. These are social
policies. You could make the policies different.

DB He also says it’s a mystery how people are becoming poorer.

If you look at that article, there are some very interesting internal
contradictions in it. He’s very critical of all these things that are
happening. Isn’t it sad so many people are suffering, etc. He’s good-
hearted. But then there’s the miracle of the market, the genius of the
market, the mysteries. On the other hand, when he talks about the
market, he only mentions three corporations: Hughes, Grumman, and
McDonnell Douglas. He says that’s the way the market is functioning.
That’s the way the market is functioning? These are state-subsidized

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corporations. You could hardly pick better examples of state industry.
The only thing that makes them part of the market is that the profits go
into private pockets. But the public is paying for it. That’s why those
corporations function.

DB / think it was you that told me about this issue of people’s
perceptions and these contradictory currents, that most Americans
believe that “From each according to his ability, to each according to
his need ” (Marx) is part of the Bill of Rights.

Part of the Constitution. That was a poll taken around 1976, the
Bicentennial. There were many polls taken. Among other things, they
gave people cliche-type things and said, Which do you think are in the
Constitution? About 50% said that that’s in the Constitution because
they take it to be so obvious. It tells you something about the failure of
the left to organize. If half the population assumes that the most extreme
position is not only true but must even be in the Constitution, that
indicates a big failure on the left.

DB We 're in the era of reform, another Orwellism, tax reform,
welfare reform. There’s also something called “lobbying reform.”
There’s a proposal to defund the left, to curb activities by non-profit
groups. It’s interesting to see what groups are mentioned there as part
of the left.

Although one should be very careful about the word “reform.” We
don’t call what Hitler did reform. Reform has a nice feel about it. It’s
supposed to make things better. So we should never use the word. We
should talk about changes. The same with “promise." Every article you
read in the paper says, You may or may not like what the Republicans

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are doing, but they’re fulfilling their promise to the American people. If I
say I’m going to beat you to a pulp, and I do it, that’s not a promise. I
didn’t promise to do it. I threatened to do it. So what they ought to say
is, The Republicans are keeping their threat to the American people.
Especially when we know how the American people feel about it. These
are not reforms, any more than we’d say Stalin and Hitler instituted
reforms. These are changes. You can like them or dislike them, but
they’re not reforms.

There are two things going on that fall under what you mentioned.
One is the Istook Amendment, which is working its way through. I don't
think it’s going to make it. It’s too extreme. But it’s in the legislative
process now. That’s a very cynical device to try to ensure that only, say,
military industry and big corporations can lobby. Anyone who has any
popular interest at heart can’t lobby, can’t try to press their interests in
the public arena. The idea is to strike another massive blow at what’s
left of the democratic system by restricting even entry into the public
arena in the form of lobbying, that is, pressing for your position.
“Lobbying” means, like, writing a letter to your representative, or
whatever you do. Restricting even that only to people who get huge
government handouts.

The way it’s done is trying various methods. The first one was to say,
If you receive government funding and you’re a non-profit organization,
you can’t use your own money for lobbying. Notice there’s no issue
about using federal money for lobbying. That’s already illegal. So that’s
out of the question. The question is, can you use your own money?
Suppose 5% of your money comes from a federal grant, can you use the
other 95% for putting forward your interest in a cleaner environment or
more health care? The first proposal was to add that condition that you
can’t, but of course restrict it only to nonprofit organizations. Meaning if
you’re making profit, like these three exemplars of the capitalist system,

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Hughes, McDonnell Douglas, and Grumman, then you can continue to
lobby at will because you’re profit-making. That got a certain amount of
flak.

The later proposal, which may actually go through, is to require that
nonprofit organizations provide accounting of every penny they spend on
every possible thing, which will wildly increase bureaucratic costs and
drive most of them out of business.

That’s one aspect of it, the Istook Amendment. The other aspect is
this program of defunding the left, which is itself interesting. I think it
was started by the Cato Institute. It’s being pushed by Congress and was
reported in the Wall Street Journal. That’s very interesting. They quote
the Heritage Foundation and Gingrich as to why we’ve got to start
defunding the left, because it’s unfair for the government to be involved
in pushing these political agendas.

“Agenda” is an interesting word. An agenda is something that people
have who are trying to do bad things, like help poor people or clean up
the environment. That’s an agenda. It’s not an agenda if you’re trying to
put more money in your pocket. So there are all these guys with
agendas, and the government’s funding them, and that’s wrong, because
why should we fund the left?

Take a look at the list. The list was right there in the Wall Street
Journal. The main organization on the left that they had to stop funding
was Catholic Relief Services, a very left-wing organization. So why do
they have to defund that part of the left? They explained that there are,
in fact, priests and nuns, who, for free, are working in Head Start
programs and helping poor people get heating for their homes. Those are
left-wing agendas. They are helping people. And since priests and nuns
are working on that, and sometimes they get a little bit of government
money for it, you’ve got to defund them. That was the main
organization. The second one was the American Association of Retired

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Persons, the AARP. That was the second left-wing organization. They
explained why they had to defund that part of the left. The reason was
that AARP was running a program to try to help elderly people who are
poor to get jobs. That’s a left-wing agenda, so they’ve got to stop that.
Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal had another article in which they
said that one out of six elderly people are suffering from hunger, many
actually starving. But if you’re trying to get them jobs, that’s a left-wing
program and we have to defund it. The next was some conservation
organization. By their standards, anyone who has the slightest concern
for human beings is on “the left." Rather flattering, actually, and also
intriguing that the mislabelled “conservatives” define themselves to
include only people who would be regarded as pathologically insane by
rational — and certainly by authentic conservative — standards.

DB Even the American Heart Association, which they want to
prevent from speaking out against the dangers of smoking and
secondhand smoke. Meanwhile Philip Morris and the heavily
subsidized tobacco industry can lobby to its heart’s content.

On the Istook Amendment, and on the whole issue, one of the biggest
supporters is the alcohol industry. They’re pushing it very hard. They
don’t want people to be able to say, There is harm in alcohol, which in
fact there is, much greater than hard drugs, though not as bad as
tobacco. The biggest corporate funder by far for all of these guys,
including last November, was Philip Morris, which is also one of the
biggest killers, so they need the protection. In fact, the agenda, if I can
borrow their word, is so clear, obvious, and dramatic that it takes a real
genius to miss it.

DB Let's talk a little bit more about the media and their impact.

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This summer there was a spate of mega-mergers in the media. Disney
took over Cap Cities/ABC. Westinghouse took over CBS. Time-Warner
took over Turner. What is your assessment of these mergers?

First of all, remember they’re part of something much more general.
There’s a merger wave now which has no precedent. Even in the peak of
the Reagan years it wasn’t like this. And there’s a move towards what
the business press is calling “mega-corporations." Which means
radically increasing the tyrannical, totalitarian structure of the global and
domestic economies. These are of course tyrannies and totalitarian
institutions. Nobody should have any doubt about that. As they get more
powerful and integrated, they constitute in that alone a big attack on
democracy and a big attack on markets, because as they dominate
interactions — that means internal to these totalitarian structures — these
huge command economies go way beyond anything people called,
ludicrously, socialist. The media mergers are one piece of that. The big
story is the increasing concentration of tyrannical power in private,
unaccountable hands, which is tar more important than what’s
happening in the media.

As to the media, what will the effect of this be? I have always been a
bit of a skeptic about this. I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to it. I
don’t think it matters a lot if, say, in Boston there are two or three
corporate newspapers or one corporate newspaper. There’s some
difference, but not a huge difference. Say there are three channels on
television which are owned by huge mega-corporations and
conglomerates and then it turns out later there’s only one because
they’re all owned by Murdoch. I suspect that the difference won’t be
substantial.

It will be something of a difference, because even within a system
where power resides in extremely narrow hands, let’s say the Politburo

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in Russia, if there are factions within the Politburo there’s a little more
freedom than if there are no factions within it But the big point is the
Politburo, not the amount of factional relations within it Even in
totalitarian states, they vary in the amount of internal factionalism within
the sector that controls power. But it’s the anti-democratic character of
it that’s significant, not the marginal question of the amount of
factionalism there is. Things like the mergers of the media, what they’re
doing is cutting down the factionalism in the Politburo, which surely is
something to worry about, but we’re wasting our time if we pay too
much attention to it, missing the larger picture.

Not a lot of people, including my close friends and associates, agree
with me on this one, so I don’t mean to say it’s obvious. I suppose it’s
not. But that’s my view.

But let me just give you a personal experience. You remember our
story with Warner and the first book (Counter-Revolutionary Violence:
Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda) that Ed Herman and I wrote in
1973. The publishing house, Warner Modular, that produced it was put
out of business, meaning they not only destroyed our book, but they
destroyed all the books that Warner Modular published. The decision to
carry out this massive attack against freedom of speech was made by an
executive of Warner Communications, who didn’t like our book.
Incidentally, none of this elicited any reaction from alleged defenders of
freedom of speech (Ben Bagdikian later wrote about itj. But they weren't
Time-Warner in those days. It was Warner Communications. Big
enough, but nowhere near what it is now and nowhere near what it is
after the latest merger. Did that make a difference in the way they
behave? No, not really. Marginal differences. I think the analogy would
be something like factions within the Politburo.

DB I've been talking to Bob Parry (independent journalist) and Jeff

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Cohen (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) about this. They contend
that it is making a difference, the mega-mergers, the concentration,
that there’s more timidity — that’s hard to imagine — and skittishness in
the newsroom because there are fewer jobs. So you have fewer options.

That’s a different matter. I think they’re confusing two different
things. Even without the mergers, the jobs are going down. That’s quite
independent. Maybe the mergers have some effect on it, but I doubt if
it’s large. The major thing is that news services are going down. That
makes sense, because after all the purpose of this whole system is to
destroy democracy, that is, to remove people from the public arena. So
the more you can put into sitcoms and advertising, and the less you put
into giving them news, the better it is. You’ve got to give them some
news. They want to have some vague idea of what’s going on. But there
are natural pressures within a state capitalist economy to drive out
anything that might bring the population into the public arena, and news
is one of those things. So of course there are going to be pressures on
cutting down news, apart from the fact that news isn’t terribly profitable.
News is a capital-intensive operation from the point of view of the
media. You’re also not going to get as much advertising for it. It doesn't
contribute to the needs of advertisers. So just as advertisers are unlikely
to fund a documentary on saving health care, they’re not going to fund a
news program which is in effect a documentary by bringing some
version of the facts, maybe a distorted version, to large parts of the
public. It's not in their interest to do so.

Hence, independent of mergers, there’s going to be continual
pressure, and there is, strikingly, now, on cutting back investigative
reporting. Maybe there will still be investigative reporting that keeps
right to the surface, like a corrupt judge. Anything insignificant. Maybe
there will be programs on the O.J. Simpson trial. Anything to keep

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people’s minds off serious things. That could continue. And the kind of
reporting that contributes to fear and hate, that will continue. But just
think of the funders and ask what their interest is in presenting an
honest view of the world. It’s very slight. That’s true whether there are
mergers or not. So it may be that there’s an effect, but I suspect it’s a
marginal effect. Incidentally, it could go the other way, too. It could turn
out that if you have one totalitarian institution running all the media,
they might allow more deviation internally because it’s much less of a
threat to them. I don’t say that would happen, but it could.

Let me give you an example. I was recently in Australia, which is
quite different from here. I was on Australian World Services, their
version of the BBC, talking about the Timor Gap Treaty. It’s a big issue
in Australia. Australia was coming to the World Court, being charged
with a violation of international law. I had a half-hour interview and was
very critical of the Australian position. That’s Australia, not the U.S. I
couldn’t imagine it happening here. It was on Australian World Services
being beamed into Indonesia through the Murdoch satellite, no less.

DB Jeff Cohen and others have commented on the surge in right-
wing media, radio talk shows specifically. Rupert Murdoch has just
funded The Standard, a new weekly right-wing journal. There’s USA
Today and on and on. You don’t detect that?

Sure. There’s been a big rise in this. It’s always going on, but there’s
an acceleration since the early 1970s. There are two things that
happened. One is that the sixties frightened a lot of people, including the
liberals. Terribly frightened. There was this “crisis of democracy." People
were getting involved in the public arena. We’ve got to drive them back
to their preferred apathy and ignorance. So that’s across the spectrum,
liberal to conservative. That led to a big attack on universities, on

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independent thought, on independent media, just about everything,
across the spectrum. That’s one thing.

The second factor was that very substantial new weapons were
coming into the hands of private power around that time. There was also
independently an acceleration in the globalization of the economy,
telecommunications revolutions, deregulation of the financial system, all
of these things were having the effect of putting very powerful weapons
in private hands. So quite apart from the sixties, there would have been
an effort to move from containment of New Deal-style liberalism, to
rollback of it. That has happened quite dramatically.

The last liberal president in the U.S. was Richard Nixon. Ever since
then it’s been, starting with Carter, an attack on social programs, an
increase in the regressive forms of state power like the Pentagon system.
These things were simultaneous. There had been talk shows. They had
been pretty awful, but there was some kind of mixture. They shifted very
sharply towards the right around this point, as did everything else. So
the flooding of college campuses with glossy, super-ultra-right-wing
newspapers in everybody’s mailbox, that started around then. The Olin
professorships of free enterprise, and contributions to academic freedom
of that kind, that also increased, as did the very narrowly focused right-
wing foundations which are trying to destroy the educational system.
They want to destroy public education. You may have noticed yesterday
in Boston, Governor Weld announced what amounts to the destruction
of the public education system. It sneaked into a legislative bill. All of
this stuff has been going on. It’s picking up, and that’s what they were
referring to. It’s real enough, but I think it’s not due to mega-mergers.

DB We’re not talking about a monolith here. You mentioned that
Wall Street Journal article, Hunger Surges Among the Elderly. They had
a piece a couple of days ago on the positive impact of government

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welfare programs in South Carolina. The New York Times is writing
about class conflict. So there are some contradictory streams here as
well.

There are all sorts of contradictions. Take the cutback of the
regulatory apparatus. The Times also had a big story a couple of weeks
ago on the fact that the big investment firms are very unhappy about it.
They need the Securities and Exchange Commission. A market, to the
extent that it exists, is a very expensive affair. Markets cost a lot of
money to set up and a lot of money to police. If you don't set them up
and you don’t police them there’s not going to be any market. There’s
just going to be fraud and corruption and disaster and rapid collapses
that are going to wipe things out. So the big guys, the big investment
firms and financial institutions and banks, rely on the SEC as
government intervention to protect the functioning of markets to the
extent that they exist, which is a limited but not zero extent. And the
attack on these commissions is something they’re not at all happy
about. The same is true of the Commerce Department. The Commerce
Department is now under attack by the Republican freshmen. But big
business wants it. It just puts money into their pockets. The Commerce
Department is one of the welfare systems for the rich, and they don’t
want that to disappear.

The same is true on environmental issues. If you notice, this whole
Republican freshman attack was going right after environmental issues.
But they’re being beaten back on that one, to a large extent because big
corporations who can think five years ahead realize that they would like
to have a world five years from now in which they can make profits, not
only today. The same with the FDA. The pharmaceutical corporations
came out against dismantling the Food and Drug Administration. They’d
maybe like it cut back, but they don't want to dismantle it. They are

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smart enough to figure out that if there is no regulation and independent
assessment, five years from now there will be some kind of thalidomide
catastrophe or something like that, and they’ll lose their international
markets. And so it goes. There has always been a symbiotic relationship
between big private capital and state power. They want to maintain it.

If you look back over American business history, there is one rather
systematic split. Tom Ferguson has done some very interesting work on
that, as have others. There’s been a consistent, pretty general distinction
between capital-intensive, high-technology, internationally-oriented
financial and industrial sectors on the one hand, which are the real big
guys, and the labor-intensive, more domestically-oriented, less advanced
technological parts of the system on the other. That’s what’s called
“small business" here, but it’s not small by any means. That difference
shows up in all sorts of things. So you find it in the lobbying system, the
Business Council and more recently the Business Roundtable. That
represents the big guys. They want a strong government. A lot of them in
various forms even support New Deal measures. They instituted some of
the New Deal measures. They were in favor of what they sometimes call
welfare capitalism. They don’t mean by that money that goes into their
pockets. What they mean is keeping a decent life for the working class,
benefits for your workers. Which doesn’t cost them a lot. They are
capital-intensive, not labor-intensive. They understand the point of a
smoothly functioning society.

On the other hand, take the Chambers of Commerce, the National
Association of Manufacturers, who typically represented the other sector.
They have quite different policies on many issues. One of the things
that’s happening in Washington right now is an unusual shift of power
toward the so-called small business side. The big business people are
perfectly happy about it, as long as it keeps enriching them, which it’s
doing. But they’re looking at it with a wary eye. The Gingrich

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Republicans talk a kind of populist line. They even talk an anti-corporate
line. Of course, they do nothing about it. If they ever start doing
something about it, it will be interesting to watch the hammer fall. I
don’t think they’re going to last very long. As long as they talk their
populist line but pour money into the pockets of the rich, they can talk
their line if they like. But when a conflict really develops, I think they
will be quietly sent on their way.

DB You Ve always commented that you weren’t too concerned if
these guys — like let’s take these Republican shock troops, as they’re
called, were the standard type of politician, skimming off the top,
corrupt, etc. — that you would be concerned if they were different. Do
you think they are different?

I think they represent something different which is interesting and
important. They represent a kind of proto-fascism. And that’s dangerous.
First of all, there’s the religious fanaticism, which is a very dangerous
thing. There’s a cultural tone about them, which shows up all over the
place, which has a very fascist character to it. All the things we’ve
discussed reflect this. And there’s a real sadism. They really want to go
for the jugular. Anybody who doesn’t meet their standards, which
means, Enrich myself tomorrow, anybody who doesn’t meet that
condition, they just want to kill, not just oppose, but destroy. They are
quite willing — cynics like Gingrich are extreme, but others are willing —
to try to engender fear and hatred against immigrants and poor people.
They are very happy to do that. Their attitudes are extremely vicious.

You can see it all over. Take the state of Alabama that has not only
restored chain gangs, but chain gangs where they truck rocks in for
people to smash up. That’s real sadism. Also our governor, William
Weld, who’s supposed to be a moderate. He’s one of the moderate

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Republicans, a nice guy type. Just last week every day in the
newspapers there was another headline about forcing people out of
homeless shelters if he didn’t like the way they lived. Like some mother
took off a day to take care of a mentally retarded child. Okay, out of the
homeless shelter. He doesn’t like that. He thinks she should work, not
take care of her child. Some disabled veteran didn’t want to move into a
well-known drug den. Okay, out on the street. That’s one day. Next day
comes state welfare, social services, have to report to the INS if they
think somebody may be an illegal immigrant. Then they get deported.
Which means their child gets deported. Their child could well be an
American citizen. So American citizens have to be deported, according
to the governor, if he doesn’t like the fact of the way their parents are
here.

The real point of it, and his purpose, is to ensure that these children
will starve to death because it means their parents won’t be able to go to
get services. They won’t be able to go to school. So really kick the kids
in the face. That’s the idea. It goes on like this, day after day. It was a
series of these through the week, like written by Jonathan Swift. One
day was a headline about how he was giving I forget how much money,
but a couple of million dollars, to the guys who were running racetracks.
They were also cutting down a tiny little pittance that went to try to deal
with compulsive gambling. Compulsive gambling is an addiction, as
harmful as other addictions. But you want to increase that addiction,
and there’s a good reason for that. Gambling is a tax on the poor. His
friends don’t go to the racetracks. It’s poor people who go to the
racetracks, just like poor people buy lottery tickets. His friends don’t.
That’s just another one of those massively regressive taxes on the poor.
So let’s increase that and furthermore put more state funds into the
hands of the racetrack owners who are doing it.

This is day after day. Pure sadism. Very self-conscious. He’s not a

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fool. And he’s trying to build public support for it by building up fear and
hatred. The idea is, There’s these teenage kids (who are black, by
implication, although you don't say that in a liberal state) who are just
ripping us off by having lots and lots of babies. We don’t want to let
them do that. So let’s hate them and let’s kick them in the face while
I'm kicking you in the face. That’s real fascism. And that’s the liberal
side. It’s not the Gingrich shock troops. That’s the liberal, moderate,
educated side.

This runs across the spectrum. Take a look at it. This combination of
extreme religious fanaticism, hysteria, intolerance, viciousness, sadism,
fear, hatred, but with people who understand it very well, like Newt
Gingrich, William Weld, and others, is a technique to ensure the
increase of totalitarian power in the hands primarily of the private
tyrannies, which they work for, but also in the hands of an increasingly
powerful state which is more and more dedicated to security systems
and devices for transferring funds towards the wealthy. That’s a
prescription for fascism. That’s dangerous.

DB You said the economic system is a "grotesque catastrophe.”
What kind of system would you propose?

That’s the topic for another discussion. I would propose a system
which is democratic. It’s long been understood (this has nothing to do
with the left per se; it’s right through the American working-class
movement, and independent social thinkers) that you don’t have
democracy unless people are in control of the major decisions. And the
major decisions, as has also long been understood, are fundamentally
investment decisions: What do you do with the money? What happens
in the country? What’s produced? How is it produced? What are working
conditions like? Where does it go? How is it distributed? Where is it

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sold? That whole range of decisions, that’s not everything in the world,
but unless that range of decisions is under democratic control, you have
one or another form of tyranny. That is as old as the hills and as
American as apple pie. You don’t have to go to Marxism or anything
else. It’s straight out of mainstream American tradition.

The reason is simple common sense. So that’s got to be the core of
it. That means total dismantling of all the totalitarian systems. The
corporations are just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism. They
come out of the same intellectual roots, in the early twentieth century.
So just like other forms of totalitarianism have to go, private tyrannies
have to go. And they have to be put under public control.

Then you look at the modalities of public control. Should it be
workers' councils or community organizations or some integration of
them? What kind of federal structure should there be? At this point
you’re beginning to think about how a free and democratic society might
look and operate. That’s worth a lot of thought. But we’re a long way
from that. The first thing you’ve got to do in any kind of change is to
recognize the forms of oppression that exist. If slaves don’t recognize
that slavery is oppression, it doesn’t make much sense to ask them why
they don’t live in a free society. They think they do. This is not a joke.

Take women. Overwhelmingly, and for a long time, they may have
sensed oppression, but they didn’t see it as oppression. They saw it as
life. The fact that you don’t see it as oppression doesn’t mean that you
don’t know it at some level. At some level you know it. The way in
which you know it can take very harmful forms for yourself and everyone
else. That’s true of every system of oppression. But unless you sense it,
identify it, understand it, understand furthermore that it’s not, as in that
New Yorker article, the genius of the market and a mystery, but
completely understandable and not a genius of anything, and easily put
under popular control — unless all those things are understood, you

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cannot proceed to the next step, which is the one you raised: How can
we change the system?

I think you can figure out how to change the system by reading the
independent working class press 150 years ago that we talked about
earlier. These were ordinary working people, artisans, “factory girls" from
New England farms, and so on. They knew how to change the system.
You know, too. They were strongly opposed to what they called “the
New Spirit of the Age: Gain wealth, forgetting all but Self.” They wanted
to retain the high culture they already had, the solidarity, the sympathy,
the control. They didn’t want to be slaves. They thought that the Civil
War was fought to end slavery, not to institute it. All of these things are
perfectly common perceptions, perfectly correct. You can turn them into
ways in which a much more free society can function.

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Israel

Rewarding the Cop on the Beat

January 6, 1996

DB The French government is trying to impose its own version of
class warfare on French workers. The response has been rather
dramatic. There have been wide-scale demonstrations , effectively
shutting down the country. What do you think of that?

It’s really not anything particularly special that the French
government is doing. It’s applying a version of neoliberal structural
adjustment, which is rammed down the throats of the Third World. They
have no choice. It’s increasingly being applied in the industrial societies
as well, the U.S. and Britain considerably in the lead, but in a globalized
economy others are being dragged along in one way or another. The
difference in France was primarily the response, not the programs. There
remains a tradition of working-class solidarity and activism that
surprised a lot of people, and that’s what happened. I don’t think it will
basically have an effect. The manifestation of it was interesting and
important and could be one of the many strands initiating other
comparable reactions, which could have a mutually reinforcing character
sooner or later.

DB Were you surprised?

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Yes. It hasn’t happened in other places where people have been hit
much harder.

DB Strikingly, it didn’t happen in Decatur, Illinois, where just about
at the same time this thing was going on in France the eighteen-month
UAW strike at Caterpillar just collapsed.

It did collapse, you’re right. But it was interesting to see how. Most of
the work force voted against capitulating. The contract was a complete
capitulation to Caterpillar. That’s recognized on all sides. It was a “rout,”
as the business press called it. The workers at the plant voted 80%
against it. The union leadership decided to accept it, and may have been
right. Their point is that the forces were so unequal that the chances of
their holding out were very slim. But it’s not comparable to France.
There it was a matter of working-class solidarity. But working-class
solidarity is actually illegal in the U.S. We don’t have things like general
strikes or even secondary boycotts. They’re excluded by law. The laws
are designed to undermine the possibility of acting on general class
interests or other general interests, which is quite unusual among
industrial societies. Maybe unique, at least among the more democratic
ones.

In France this was a national issue. H a rd I y anyone here knew about
the Decatur situation. There was barely any coverage of anything that
had been happening, except in the business press now and then or, let’s
say, the Chicago Tribune, the kind of papers that are business-oriented
and nearby. But very few people knew anything about it. As you recall,
when Decatur workers came to the Boston area to try to raise some
support, they could barely get any people out to a meeting, which is very
unusual. Almost anything gets a big crowd under comparable
circumstances. So they were left alone, hanging on a limb.

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Caterpillar was in an extremely strong position. Like corporate
America generally, it has made huge profits in recent years. It had, I
think, about 40% or 50% profit growth in the last year. And they’ve
used their profits for a very sensible business strategy. These are people
who are fighting a bitter class war. They’ve used them to create excess
capacity overseas so that, as they explain to the business press, they
could undermine any workers’ actions by simply using their other
facilities, many overseas, to ensure that they maintain their market.
Also, in the U.S., again unusual, maybe unique among industrial
societies, it’s permitted to employ permanent replacement workers,
which is worse than scabs, to destroy strikes. The U.S. has been cited
for that by the International Labor Organization, but it continues. And a
huge number of part-time workers, and so on. So Caterpillar was in a
very strong position to carry out a very efficient class war in a successful
effort to undermine some of the last remnants of American unionism.

There was very little general solidarity, in part because there was
simply no awareness. The thing was kept under wraps. Also because the
options for common action have been very much undercut, in part
simply by legal measures and in part by a huge onslaught of propaganda
to just simply drive such ideas out of people’s minds and leave them
alone, facing awesome power by themselves.

DB One other thing about the Caterpillar strike in Decatur: There
have been almost Stalinist-like restrictions on the returning workers.

Not “almost.” The Wall Street Journal had an article which was
headlined by saying that workers have gag rules imposed. The company
will allow some workers to return, which is already pretty outlandish,
but they are under a gag rule which requires that they say nothing about
the strike. They say nothing critical of management. They don’t wear T-

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shirts that have something that the company considers harmful to its
reputation. It’s straight Stalinist. It’s not “Stalinist-like."

DB Let's move on that note of Stalin to Russia. Recent elections
there indicate a revival of support for the Communist Party. Is that
entirely unexpected?

I don’t quite interpret it that way. It’s not just in Russia. It’s all over
Eastern Europe. The standard version, which is actually given in a New
York Times report that I’m almost quoting, is that nostalgia for the past
is increasing as it recedes further into the distance. I don’t think there’s
any indication of nostalgia for the Stalinist dungeon. It’s not that the
past is receding. It’s that the present is approaching, and the present
happens to be Brazil and Mexico. However horrifying the Soviet
socioeconomic system might have been, the way people live in the
comparable countries that we run are, for the most part, much worse.
So for the large majority of the population of places like, say, Brazil,
Guatemala, or Mexico, the conditions of Eastern Europe would have
seemed very impressive indeed. Now what the people of Eastern Europe
are seeing is that they are being returned to Third World conditions, the
conditions of countries that we’ve been running for a long, long time.
And as that approaches, they don’t like it. Just as if the population in
our own domains had a choice, they wouldn’t like it, either. And that’s
what I think one is seeing, not a kind of revival of love for the dungeon
that has disappeared.

DB Moving on to Haiti , there were elections there also very recently.
Generally, U.S. commentary has been very critical of Jean-Bertrand
Aristide and the Lavalas movement.

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It’s actually mixed. First of all, it’s important to recognize that certain
critical facts are still kept very, very quiet. One is that there was no
embargo, to speak of. To mention one striking example, public but still
largely suppressed, the Bush and Clinton administrations authorized
Texaco to ship oil illegally to the junta and its rich supporters. The
second is that Aristide was allowed to return under very strict conditions,
an extreme form of structural adjustment, exactly what the public voted
against in the 1990 election that so scandalized U.S. power. He hasn’t
entirely been living up to them. Haiti is in a way like France. It’s one of
the few countries where there has been popular resistance to the
imposition of these neoliberal structural adjustment programs. Aristide
has roots among the people, and he has to some extent reflected that
and has not gone along as willingly as have the usual Third World elites
with the orders from Washington, the World Bank, and the IMF. Haiti
has been punished for that. The very limited funds that have been
offered have indeed been withheld because of their refusal to undergo a
program which would essentially dismantle the entire governmental
system and turn it over to private power to an unprecedented extent.
They’ve been dragging their feet on that. There’s been a lot of popular
resistance. As a result, Aristide is criticized.

But the democratic structures which swept him into power, the
grassroots movements, have not been demolished by years of terror. And
although he has — lacking any alternative, in my opinion — gone along
pretty much with the external power that allowed him to return, he
hasn’t done it with the proper willingness and enthusiasm and devotion
to the masters, which does arouse criticism.

DB Do you know anything about the new president, Rene Preval?

He’s been close to Aristide and does reflect pretty much the same

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views. I think he has essentially the same base of support.

DB Haiti was an example of what is called “humanitarian
intervention.” Somalia is another. Bosnia is also cited. Are there
instances where you would support such actions?

First of all, I suppose just about every military action in history has
been described as humanitarian intervention. They may not have used
that term, but some similar one. It’s always with very noble purposes.
And if you try to find genuine examples in history of authentic
humanitarian intervention, you’re going to find pretty slim pickings. On
the other hand, I don’t think you can give a general principle about
when the use of military force is legitimate. It depends on what the
alternatives are. So there are circumstances in which maybe that’s the
least bad of the available alternatives. You just have to look at things on
a case-by-case basis. There are some general principles that one can
adhere to, but they don’t lead to specific conclusions for every
conceivable case.

DB / know on Bosnia you received many requests for support of
intervention to stop what people called “genocide.” Was it genocide?

“Genocide” is a term that I myself don’t use even in cases where it
might well be appropriate.

DB Why not?

I just think the term is way overused. Hitler carried out genocide.
That’s true. It was in the case of the Nazis a determined and explicit
effort to essentially wipe out populations that they wanted to disappear

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from the face of the earth. That’s genocide. The Jews and the Gypsies
were the primary victims. There were other cases where there has been
mass killing. The highest per capita death rate in the world since the
1970s has been East Timor. In the late 1970s it was by far in the lead.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t call it genocide. I don’t think it was a planned
effort to wipe out the entire population, though it may well have killed
off a quarter or so of the population. In the case of Bosnia — where the
proportions killed are far less — it was horrifying, but it was certainly far
less than that, whatever judgment one makes, even the more extreme
judgments. I just am reluctant to use the term. I don’t think it’s an
appropriate one. So I don’t use it myself. But if people want to use it,
fine. It’s like most of the other terms of political discourse. It has
whatever meaning you decide to give it. So the question is basically
unanswerable. It depends what your criteria are for calling something
genocide.

On the calls for military intervention, they were of an interesting
character. They were very vague. I've never seen, during all these years
in which there’s been a lot of laments about the collapse of Western
civilization and so on, I just didn’t see any substantive proposals as to
what could be done. Do something, was what people said. Send troops.
But what are they going to do? The substantive proposals were
extremely slim. What has been done I think is quite ugly. What has been
done, and I think this has been in the works for a long time, is
essentially leading to an effective partition of the region, the former
Yugoslavia. Slovenia is out of it, but except for that, the rest of it into a
Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia, with Bosnia pretty much partitioned.
They may call it a state, but part of it will be part of Croatia and part of
it will be part of Serbia.

Greater Croatia is already pretty much a U.S. client. The U.S. has
been helping it arm and has been supporting it. And I think that the

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U.S. anticipates the same will be true of Greater Serbia, so if it works
out that way it will place the U.S. in effective control of the former
Yugoslavia, which is pretty much a return to the previous status quo.
That region has considerable significance. From the U.S. perspective it’s
always been regarded as part of the periphery of the Middle East, the
whole system of protection and control over energy resources.

It’s also a kind of a base for entry into the restored Third World of
Eastern Europe, where there are common interests among the major
industrial powers, but there are also conflicts. So the U.S. has
somewhat different ideas about how to exploit Eastern Europe from
those of, say, France and Germany. The base in the Balkans places the
U.S. in a position to implement its own power interests and economic
interests. So a U.S. takeover of that region, or, more accurately, a re-
takeover of the region, is not an unexpected goal of foreign policy. What
the U.S. has done is sort of stand on the sidelines as long as it was
tough going there. When it looked as if a military balance had been
established, primarily by U.S. aid to Croatia and indirect aid to the
Bosnian Muslims — which in fact the U.S. actually let Iran do a lot of—
now that that balance was more or less set and it looked as though it
would be possible simply to insert U.S. forces to separate warring
armies without too much threat or danger, and of course commitment to
use massive force if anything goes wrong, then the U.S. sent in troops.

Now suppose I had been in Congress, let’s say, and had been asked
to choose between exactly two alternatives. One, let them keep
massacring one another. Two, put in U.S. troops to separate warring
armies, to partition the country into two U.S. dependencies with a
possibility that something may go badly wrong, as in Somalia, and there
might be a huge slaughter. If those are the two choices, I probably
would have voted for sending the troops.

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DB What about Germany's interests in and links to Croatia? Do you
think that’s significant?

It’s very significant. Germany took the initiative in the early stages, in
a very premature recognition of Slovenia and Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina. Slovenia was sort of reasonable, I suppose. But in the case
of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the recognition was first a German
initiative, and the European Union went along very quickly, without any
concern for a rather serious question, namely, the rights of substantial
Serbian minorities. That’s not to justify the way they reacted, but there
were legitimate concerns and they were not taken into account. That
was just a prescription for disaster.

DB Misha Glenny and others have cited the German recognition as
igniting Serb fears of a resurgence of German power in the Balkans.
They have memories there.

They have plenty of memories. Everybody has memories. Again, none
of this is justification for what happened. But the recognition of the
independence of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina without any concern
for this obviously quite serious problem was throwing a match into a can
of gasoline.

DB It seems to me that Clinton was very anxious to supplant U.N.
forces with NATO. Do you agree?

Only at the right moment. As long as it was difficult, they wanted
U.N. forces in there. As long as there was fighting and danger and
difficulties in getting humanitarian supplies, the U.S. wanted to be out of
it. NATO means the U.S. It’s a cover for the U.S. The U.S. only wants to

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move in when the game is over and it can pick up the pieces. So the
hard work was done by the Europeans. You can ask how well they did
it. Pretty badly, I think. But nevertheless, it was their task. The U.S. was
on the sidelines. It was willing to bomb but nothing else. By the time it
seemed as if the conflict had a possible resolution by insertion of force,
massive force, that would not be under any threat, by the time that
looked possible, the Clinton administration wanted the U.N. out and
wanted to take over. It’s not very different from Somalia. In the case of
Somalia, as long as the conflict was raging and there was a terrible
famine and people were dying and there were a lot of murders, the U.S.
just simply stayed out, didn’t want anything to do with it. When the
fighting was declining and it looked like there was going to be a good
harvest and there was a fair chance that the famine was ending, the Red
Cross and other efficient agencies were getting food through — at that
point the U.S. moved in with a massive show of force and a huge PR
operation, expecting to get a lot of at least favorable publicity out of it.
Indeed, that would have happened if it hadn’t been for U.S. military
doctrine, which is unusual. It requires that U.S. forces never be put
under any threat at all. If someone looks at them the wrong way, we call
out the helicopter gun-ships. That’s why the U.S. is pretty much
disqualified from peacekeeping operations that involve civilians. And
they’ve made it very clear, incidentally, in Bosnia, that they’re going to
do the same thing. Massive force if anybody gets in their way, unlike
these wishy-washy Europeans, who don’t just kill anybody in sight. In
Somalia it led to a disaster. According to U.S. sources, somewhere
between 7500 and 10,000 Somali civilians were killed before the U.S.
forces were withdrawn. And that was not a very conflictive situation.

DB You 're saying that the U.S. was responsible directly for those
deaths?

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A good bit of it. Just violent overreaction to minor provocations, the
kind of thing that other countries don’t respond to. For example, at the
same time that U.S. forces went into Bosnia, with huge coverage and
front-page stories, if you really looked into the back pages and the small
items, you might discover that at that very same time, Norwegian
peacekeeping forces in Southern Lebanon were attacked by Israeli tanks
and several were severely wounded and hospitalized. We don’t have the
rest of the story because it wasn’t reported. If anything like that
happened to U.S. forces, even anything far less than that, there would
have been a massive military response.

DB Can’t also the U.S. point to these kinds of interventions as a
justification for continued massive military spending?

Sure. It’s used for that, in fact. The Somali intervention was pretty
openly described that way. Colin Powell and others put it in pretty much
those terms, pointing out that the Pentagon budget was in trouble and
they needed some good public relations.

DB Let’s turn now to focus on the Middle East. It is received wisdom
that the September 1995 Oslo accord has pretty much settled the
Israeli-Palestinian question. Typical headlines were, “Israel Agrees to
Quit West Bank.” “At the White House, Symbols of a Day of Awe.”
“The Undeniable Reality: The Palestinians are on Their Way to an
Independent State; the Jews are Bidding Farewell to Portions of the
Holy Land to which They Have Historically Felt Most Linked, ” and on
and on. You take exception to those views.

Not entirely. I think some of it is correct. It is a day of awe. It was a

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tremendous victory for the rule of force in international affairs, a very
impressive one, and a extraordinary doctrinal victory as well. Maybe that
should inspire awe. It’s possible that it may resolve the conflict pretty
much the way that the great powers have been doing in Bosnia may
resolve that conflict by partitioning it. There are ways to resolve things.
The problem of the Native Americans was resolved. They’re not around
any more. So the problem was resolved. The Israel-Palestine problem
may be resolved in the same fashion. Certainly the Oslo agreements are
a long step towards it.

On the other hand, the factual descriptions are just farcical. Israel
didn’t quit the West Bank. It indicated no intention of quitting the West
Bank. In fact, it made very clear its intention, and its intention means
Washington’s intention, because otherwise it doesn’t happen. So
Washington made clear with its Israeli client that it would not quit the
West Bank. On and on the rest of the story is just the most outlandish
fabrication. Just simply look at the bare facts. This agreement didn't
deal with the Gaza Strip, where Israel retains the roughly 30% it
wanted. And in fact in its recent budget it has just assigned that part of
the Gaza Strip to Israel itself. It places it under the budget for the Negev.
That cuts off the areas assigned to Palestinian administration from any
access to the Arab world.

In the West Bank, which was covered by the Oslo agreement of
September 28, they divided it into four areas. One area is total Israeli
control. That’s 70%. Another area is given to Palestinian administration,
the municipal areas of a half-dozen cities. That’s 2%. The remainder,
roughly 28%, consists of about a hundred isolated sectors within the
Israeli 70% which are given local autonomy under overall Israeli control.
There’s a fourth region, that’s Jerusalem, which Israel has already
annexed. Jerusalem means Greater Jerusalem, a big, expanding area, a
substantial part of the West Bank. It’s kind of intriguing that if you look

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at the maps, not only in Israel but in the New York Times, they simply
assign that area to Israel. So the New York Times map colors it the same
color as Israel. The West Bank is everything but that. So that region,
though theoretically up for negotiation, has already been assigned to
Israel by itself and the U.S. government and the New York Times. So
those are the four areas. To talk about Israel withdrawing from the West
Bank under those conditions is ridiculous. It becomes even more absurd
when you look at the further conditions.

Israel retains veto power over any legislation passed by Palestinians
anywhere in any of the areas where they have a degree of local
autonomy. The Palestinian authorities are required, and agreed, to
accept the legality of Israeli rights in the West Bank and Israeli
sovereignty over what Israel will determine to be state lands or absentee
lands. Those are pretty loose categories, but they will amount to
essentially what Israel feels like keeping. That, incidentally, totally
undermines U.N. 242, completely dismantles it, the basic diplomatic
framework, which called for withdrawal from the territories. And it
completely rescinds the decisions of the Security Council and of just
about every government in the world that the settlements are illegal and
that Israel has no sovereign rights in the territories. That’s all rescinded.
The Palestinian Authority agrees to accept that Israel does have
sovereign rights there and what it does is legal and legitimate.

There was great talk about the amazing transformation in Yitzhak
Rabin. He was willing to concede. Israel was willing to make a “historic
compromise." Simply compare what they took in Oslo II with what they
had been calling for at the peak period of refusal to have any dealings
whatsoever with the Palestinians or to recognize any of their rights. So
in 1988, for example, when the U.S. and Israel were refusing any
dealings with the Palestinians, any recognition of Palestinian rights, an
extreme point of rejectionism, at that point Yitzhak Rabin was Defense

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Minister, and he called for keeping 40% of the West Bank and Gaza.
They didn’t want the rest. That’s the traditional position. Now they’ve
got between 70% and 98%, depending on how you estimate it. About
twice as much as what they had asked for at their most extreme
position.

I don’t think they’re going to keep that much. It would be crazy. In
subsequent imposed agreements, I presume that they’ll reduce their own
integration of the territories to what they’ve always wanted.

Meanwhile, it’s not just words. It’s also actions on the ground. So the
new budget, which was just passed by the Knesset, the Parliament, in
late November, after Oslo II and after the Rabin assassination, calls for
tens of millions of dollars for new settlements in the West Bank, the
Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, funded as usual by the American
taxpayer in one or another fashion. It offers even inducements for new
settlers. This includes, just to show how extreme it is: There are new
settlers who go to the Gaza Strip, which is a very arid area where people
don’t have drinking water. They will be given special subsidies for fish
ponds in the new budget. That’s typical. Meanwhile, Israel’s military
budget is going up, but mostly for the construction of what they call
“bypass roads," a big network of infrastructure roads that will enable
Jewish settlers on the West Bank to travel freely without even seeing
scattered Arab villages which are isolated from one another and will
disappear somehow. It also cantonizes the region, breaks it into separate
areas. So whatever local autonomy is granted won’t have any larger
significance.

DB In a Z magazine article you make an analogy with the Oslo
accords and New York State ceding authority over certain areas. What
was that?

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It’s kind of as if the New York State authorities decided to cede
control of the South Bronx and the slums of Buffalo to local authorities,
meanwhile taking the wealthy urban areas, the useful land, the
resources, the commercial and financial centers, in fact, anything they
wanted. They’d be delighted to do that if they could.

DB How do the Oslo accords treat the question of Palestinian
refugees, right of return, and/or compensation?

That’s simply gone. There’s nothing there for the refugees. Yitzhak
Rabin and his colleagues have made it very clear and explicit that they
are not going to get anything. They’re out of the game. The U.S. backs
that. Remember, everything that happens there happens because the
U.S. backs it. Otherwise it does not happen. So this is U.S. policy, much
more extreme under Clinton than his predecessors, incidentally. The
idea is to somehow just scatter them like human waste somewhere.
That is in direct violation of long-standing international agreements going
right back to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948,
one provision of which called for the right of return of people to
territories from which they had been expelled. The explicit intention was
to affirm the Palestinians’ right. This was made clear and explicit the
next day, when the U.N. unanimously, including the U.S., endorsed the
right of Palestinians specifically to return or compensation under this
provision, Article 13 of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. That’s all
gone. It’s never been more than rhetoric, but now even the rhetoric’s
gone.

DB Are you saying that Washington runs everything and there’s no
such thing as Israeli sovereignty?

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Oh, no. It’s not that there’s no such thing as Israeli sovereignty. The
state of Nevada has some sovereignty, too. But Washington’s influence
is overwhelming. Remember, Israel gets a degree of foreign support that
is just off the scale. There’s no country that even comes close. You can’t
call it the fifty-first state of the Union, because no state gets anywhere
near that amount of per capita aid from the federal government. There’s
no country in the world that compares. It’s just not on the spectrum.
U.S. influence in the region is overwhelming. The U.S. controls the
major oil producers. Egypt’s a client. Turkey is pretty much a client.
Pakistan often has been. As long as the Shah was in power, Iran was
another client. Of course, control is not total. It’s not even total in
Central America. But it’s very extensive. In the case of Israel, the
dependency is extremely high.

DB In that same Z article, you say that the U.S. gives $3 billion
annually to Israel, “perhaps twice that if we add other devices. " What
are those devices, and how does Israel command that level of U. S. aid?

There’s a whole range of devices which have been looked into in
some detail by people like Donald Neff and others, who have arrived at
the $6 billion figure. They include loans that are turned into grants,
delaying payment, all sorts of financial trickery, handover of technology.
There’s a whole mass of devices. I think that Neff’s rough estimate of
about $6 billion probably isn’t too far from the mark. The $3 billion
alone is unprecedented. How does Israel get that degree of aid? There’s
debate over that. There have basically been two positions. This is
independent of whether you support or oppose it. People, whatever
position they take on that, have divided over two factors. One is the
domestic lobby. The second is the strategic role that Israel plays in U.S.
general global policy. My own view is that it’s the second factor that’s

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largely responsible for this.

DB The one you called the “local cop on the beat”?

It’s not I who called it that. I’m borrowing the term from Richard
Nixon’s Secretary of Defense.

DB Melvin Laird. While police headquarters remain in Washington.

That’s my term. So his words were, “We need local cops on the
beat." I just added a little gloss: And police headquarters remain in
Washington.

DB Whether it’s the $3 billion official figure or the $6 billion one,
that’s an awfully high salary to pay for a cop.

The U.S. gets a lot out of it. Take that $3 billion. A lot of it is military
aid. What’s military aid? Military aid is payment by the U.S. taxpayer to
U.S. corporations. That’s money that doesn’t move out of U.S. banks.
Incidentally, that’s true of a lot of foreign aid. You want to maintain the
high-tech sector of the U.S. economy. The way we do that is under a
military cover. One way of doing it is producing and exporting high-
technology waste. That’s the majority of the $3 billion.

Then there’s plenty more that’s involved. There are mutual operations
in technology development. There’s intelligence sharing. Israel has been
a mercenary state. For example, when Congress imposed human rights
constraints on the Carter and Reagan administrations and wouldn’t let
them participate directly in the ongoing slaughters in Guatemala, they
could turn to Israel for help. Not just Israel, also Taiwan, Britain,
Argentine neo-Nazis. The U.S. is a big boy on the block. It has big terror

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networks. But Israel has been a big part of this in Africa, Latin America,
Asia, and elsewhere. But its primary role is as a crucial part of the
system of support of the family dictatorships that the British used to call
the “Arab fagade” that manages the energy resources and ensures that
the profits flow to the West. There has always been a kind of tacit
alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And now it’s likely to come
more to the surface. That’s an important role. In fact, if you take a look
at U.S. aid, it shot up in 1967, after Israel smashed the Egyptian forces
of Nasser, which were the leading forces for independence in the Arab
world and considered a great danger. Israel smashed that. Aid to Israel
shot up.

It went up again, in fact more than quadrupled, in 1970, when
Jordan was carrying out a massacre of Palestinians. It looked for a
moment as though Syria might intervene to support the Palestinians, at
which point the U.S. asked Israel to just mobilize to bar that, and it did.
“Black September," as it was called, could continue. That was
considered very important. Henry Kissinger himself described it as one
of the most important contributions that Israel made, and military aid
shot up. So it continues. These are some of the reasons why I’m
skeptical about the domestic lobbying interpretation. In my view
domestic lobbies work insofar as they line up with major power
interests. Then they may have an effect, even a swing effect. But not an
independent effect.

DB Is there a figure on how much money the U.S. has given to
Israel since 1948? Does anybody know?

Sure, you can find it out. It wasn’t enormous, it wasn’t high until
1967. Virtually all Israeli capital formation up till 1967 was from
external sources, either from the U.S. or German reparations. Remember

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that the U.S. gives aid in another way, too. Israel is the only country to
which it is possible to make tax-free donations. If you want to make tax-
free donations for the purchase of land from which Arabs are excluded,
you can do that tax-free in the U.S. And that amounts to a lot of money.
So if you add up all the money, even up to 1967, it was pretty
substantial. But after that it goes off the chart. In 1978, Israel was
receiving more than half of official U.S. aid worldwide. It usually runs
about a third. And that’s just official aid. It doesn’t count the other stuff.

DB It’s been suggested already that if there is a Syria-lsrael deal on
the Golan Heights that the U.S. will essentially pay the bill.

In a sense it will pay the bill, but the U.S. pays the bill for
maintaining the state altogether to a large extent. Similarly with Egypt.
Take a look at U.S. foreign aid. The biggest component of it is Israel,
Egypt, and Turkey. It has included Pakistan. It varies a bit over the
years, so there have been years when El Salvador was up there. But
over a long period it’s basically those states. Per capita, of course, that
means overwhelmingly Israel. That’s all part of the system of what the
Nixon administration called the “local cops on the beat.” The Arab
fagade ensures that the flow of profits from oil go to the West, mainly to
the U.S. and Britain, and not to the people of the region. That Arab
fagade needs protection from its own population. There has always been
a ring of gendarmes that provides that protection, and they get
supported.

DB The New York Times is writing articles saying, Tel Aviv is
“awash” with luxury cars. Israel is a “rich” country. Its standard of
living is higher than a couple of European states.

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It’s a rich country thanks largely to outside aid. On the other hand,
remember it’s a U.S. client, which means it’s coming to resemble the
U.S. So it has a very high proportion of the population living in poverty,
and it has extremely high inequality. I think it’s second only to the U.S.
among the rich countries.

DB But the question arises, in this time of so much obsession with
fiscal austerity and budget cuts, why is this money not being a topic of
debate?

How about the subsidies to the wealthy in the U.S.? Is that a topic of
debate? The Pentagon budget just went up. Fiscal austerity means fiscal
austerity for the poor, not for the rich. Here’s some figures from Israel, if
you're interested, from the Jerusalem Post a few weeks ago. Headline:
“Record 670,000 Lived Under Poverty Line in 1994, an increase of
about 24,000 over 1993.” Going up very fast. As the wealth is going
up. In this respect it’s quite similar to the U.S.

But “fiscal austerity” is a term that is not intended seriously. There’s
no fiscal austerity for the Fortune 500, who have just celebrated their
fourth straight year of double-digit profit growth. Part of the reason for
that profit growth is precisely federal subsidy. These guys have forgotten
what capitalism is even supposed to be. There was a front-page article
in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Two states, Maryland and
Virginia, were competing with different strategies for economic
development. For a while, Maryland was going ahead, and then Virginia
did. The article is all full of talk about their entrepreneurial values and
business-friendly climate and what great success stories they are.
Virginia is now in the lead. Take a look closely and you’ll notice that it’s
not Virginia and Maryland. It’s the parts of Virginia and Maryland that
border on Washington. The difference of strategy that’s being followed is

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that Maryland has been banking on biotechnology, expecting to rip off
the National Institutes of Health, and Virginia has been banking on
electronics and high tech, counting on ripping off the Pentagon budget.
That’s their business strategy: Which part of the federal government can
we use to subsidize us? The reason why Virginia is doing better is that
they picked the winner at the moment, namely, the Pentagon system,
which is the traditional technique for maintaining high technology.
That’s called “entrepreneurial capitalism."

DB That creates the “opportunity society” that the right wing touts.

There’s no fiscal austerity there. There’s fiscal austerity for children
whose mothers don’t live the way Newt Gingrich says they should.

DB Let's get back to the Middle East. In writing and speaking on the
topic you sometimes cite Israel Shahak as a source. Who is he?

Israel Shahak has been for many years Israel’s leading civil
libertarian. He’s a militant civil libertarian who, since shortly after the
1967 war, has been defending Palestinian rights and the rights of other
oppressed people, no matter who’s oppressing them, whether it’s the
Palestinian authorities and the PLO or Israel. He also writes quite a lot
about religious coercion and its effects, which are quite extreme in
Israel, and on many other topics. He also is an invaluable source of
information on any number of topics. He also circulates to people who
read Hebrew tons of stuff from the Hebrew press. He does a lot of
translations which have been very useful. The Israeli press covers things,
for example, the occupied territories, with considerable accuracy, way
beyond anything that one finds here. So he’s been a very valuable
source. He himself is a Holocaust survivor. He was a child in the

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Warsaw ghetto and ended up after the ghetto uprising in Bergen-Belsen
for a couple of years and then went to Israel. We’ve been personal
friends for many years.

DB You Ve always been critical of Yasir Arafat and his leadership of
the PLO. Have you seen anything in the last few months that would
perhaps cause you to reassess your view?

Yes. It’s getting worse.

DB In what way?

I’ve always been critical, back to the time when he emerged in the
late 1960s, pretty harshly critical all through, but now it’s getting much
worse. The repression in the West Bank is quite serious. It’s reaching as
far as even not just the usual targets, but very visible figures, leading
human rights activists, editors, and so on. The control of the electoral
process reached such a level of absurdity that it was condemned by
European Union observers. Israel had made it very clear what kind of
arrangement they were making with Arafat right after the first Oslo
agreement. Yitzhak Rabin, who was Prime Minister (this is now
September 1993, the “great breakthrough”), was explaining it to his
party, the Israeli Labor Party, or maybe it was to the Parliament. He
pointed out that it would be a good idea to have Arafat’s forces carry out
local administration, that is, run the local population, instead of the
Israeli military, because then there won’t be any complaints to the High
Court or protests to human rights organizations or mothers and fathers
and bleeding hearts. In other words, they can do a good job. Israel in
fact is shifting to the traditional form of colonial control, at last. When
the British ran India, or white South Africans and Rhodesians ran their

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countries, they tried not to use their own troops. They overwhelmingly
used local mercenaries. The U.S. does the same in Central America. We
try to use the security forces. If it’s necessary, U.S. troops go in, but
local mercenaries called state security forces or paramilitary forces are
much more efficient, for exactly the reasons that Rabin said. That’s the
role that the Palestinian Authority is supposed to play. And if Arafat
doesn’t play it he’s not going to last long. That’s the deal he made with
Israel. In return, they will be treated very well, like Third World elites
generally.

DB It's interesting to contrast U.S. aid to Israel and U.S. generosity
to the Palestinians, for example. The U.S. is committed to providing
$500 million over five years. That’s 100 million bucks a year. It’s not
much money.

It’s virtually nothing. A couple of days ago I got a letter from an Israeli
friend, a professor at Ben-Gurion University who runs the Israeli human
rights group for Gaza. He travels there. He told me there’s terrible
poverty and this and that. There’s some construction and development
going on, and no sign of any U.S. money. What money there is is from
the European Union or some other source.

DB Early this morning I was looking at your 1974 book Peace in the
Middle East? It had a question mark at the end. You were part of a
group that had a vision of a binational state in Palestine. It seems that
events have gone in a diametrically opposite direction. Is there any
chance to revive that dream?

Yes. In fact, I think that’s the only plausible outcome at this point. I
was always pretty skeptical, as you recall, both in that book and later,

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about the two-state settlement ideas that were being proposed. They
were, in fact, the international consensus for quite a few years. It never
seemed to me very reasonable. Maybe some kind of federal arrangement
or something. But at this point, the issue of two states is dead. There is
not going to be any meaningful Palestinian state. It’s over. In fact, there
will be no full Israeli withdrawal as required by the international
diplomatic framework that the U.S. helped to craft, then completely
undermined. That’s pretty clear. What is being instituted is a kind of an
apartheid system, as has been pointed out by Israeli commentators,
meaning something like the system that South Africa imposed in the
1950s, even with Bantustans, which they'll call maybe a Palestinian
state. The right end result of that is to overcome apartheid, as in South
Africa, and move to some sort of cantonal arrangement or federal
arrangement or other form of arrangement that will recognize, ultimately
(I hope not too far in the future), the equal rights of all people there,
which is going to mean their communal rights as well.

DB There never was much sympathy, as you look over this whole
question over the last forty or fifty years, for the Palestinian side in the
U.S. The little there was is virtually disappearing. For example, there
was the Middle East Justice Network and its newsletter, Breaking the
Siege. They’re no longer in existence.

You have to be a little cautious about that. The general American
population has been in favor of a Palestinian state by about two to one
for most of the time that polls were taken. And that’s without hearing it
anywhere. So as usual, there’s a big difference between elite opinion
and general opinion. But among elite circles you’re absolutely right. So
in the press and in elite discussion and journals of opinion, the
Palestinians don’t exist. They’re just a bunch of terrorists. Just to give

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one trivial example: When the New York Times assigned Greater
Jerusalem to Israel, did you hear a peep of protest?

DB No, there was nothing. And also, the figure that is given for the
settlers on the West Bank and Gaza always excludes Jerusalem. The
figure in circulation is 130,000.

Which is under half of the settlers. In fact, Teddy Kollek — who was
the mayor of Jerusalem — is considered a great hero here, a great
humanitarian and a marvellous person who was bringing about Arab-
Israeli harmony in Jerusalem. What he was doing, in fact, was setting
up highly discriminatory regulations and procedures to try to overcome
the Arab majority in East Jerusalem, where the population was
crammed into narrower and narrower quarters, not permitted to build
while land was being confiscated and Jewish settlement was being
heavily subsidized. He was very clear about it. He said, Look, I’m not
going to do anything to help the Arabs unless it’s needed for the benefit
of Jews. He said, We’ll improve their health standards because we don’t
want them to get cholera because maybe it’ll spread to the Jewish
population. But beyond that, nothing, except occasionally for some
“picture-window effect," as he called it. That’s what the U.S. taxpayer is
funding. Not only that, but what American intellectuals are calling, as
Irving Howe once put it, strides towards social democracy that are an
inspiration to all of us.

DB / know you’re always kind of reluctant to suggest things for
people to do. Might there be some avenues that people can pursue on
this particular issue?

Sure. This is one of the easiest ones there is.

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DB Why do you say that?

There’s a very well-established international consensus which the
U.S. itself helped frame (in fact was instrumental in framing), which
calls for total Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, period.
That was the official U.S. position. The U.S. framed it. That could be
reconstituted. It happened to collapse in the government under
Kissinger’s influence in 1971, but it’s not an option because people
aren’t aware of it. Nor does there have to be any support whatsoever for
aid policies that go toward carrying out what I just described in
Jerusalem. What’s called “aid” to Israel is a funny kind of aid. It’s the
kind of aid that’s driving more and more people under the poverty line.
It’s aid in the usual sense: aid to some sectors, harming other sectors.
That doesn’t have to happen. Countries should receive aid. I don’t think
rich countries should have the priority for aid, but if they do, it doesn't
have to be the kind that leads to a record number of people under the
poverty line, going up higher than any rich country outside the U.S. It
doesn't have to be that kind of aid any more than we have to have that
social policy here. There’s plenty that Americans can do, especially in
this area, where the U.S. influence and power is so decisive. But of
course, as usual, it requires first escaping from the tentacles of our
propaganda system, which in this particular case is really awesome in
its power.

DB What’s ahead for you? I know you have a trip coming up to
India.

I’m leaving in a couple of days.

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DB What are you going to be doing there?

The usual thing. It’s initially political talks organized by an Institute of
Economics in Delhi and extending around Delhi to Calcutta, Hyderabad,
and Trivandrum. It’s mostly political talks, some on linguistics and other
topics.

DB You were last in India twenty years ago?

More than that. In 1972 I was there to give the Nehru Memorial
Lectures.

DB It will be interesting to talk to you about your impressions of
India when you come back.

I’m afraid when I look at my schedule my impressions are mostly
going to be of airports and the insides of lecture halls.

DB We started this series of interviews with you sort of
contemplating winding down things at MIT and your teaching career
there. Any further thoughts on that?

No, not really. I have no definite plans. I forget what we talked about,
that was a long time ago. It’s very uncertain.

DB But you want to keep your rigorous schedule of talks and
incessant requests for interviews like this one at the current level?

“Want” is a funny word for it.

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DB Is there much choice, with the level of demand?

Not only that, but just a feeling that I’m not doing what I should.

DB If you had your druthers, what would you rather be doing?

It gets pretty wearing, but what I should be doing is way more of this
kind of thing.

DB Thanks a lot. Bon voyage!

Classics in Politics: Class Warfare

Noam Chomsky

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